Dec. 3 — On November 18, 2014, International Data Corporation (IDC) announced the eighth round of recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at the SC’14 high performance computing (HPC) conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Two sets of winners are announced each year, at the November SC conference in the U.S. and the June ISC HPC conference in Germany. This round saw a second winner from PRACE SHAPE, after the award for Thesan in June.
In June 2014, at the ISC HPC Conference in Leipzig, Germany, IDC already awarded Thesan srl, an Italian SME active in the renewable energy sector which teamed up with the Italian supercomputing centre CINECA to develop simulation-driven engineering of hydroelectric turbines under the PRACE SHAPE programme: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24953814.
The eighth round of awardees at SC’14 included only one European recipient, also a PRACE SHAPE supported project, led by Pascal De Resseguier of Nexio Simulation, a French SME of 50 employees located in Toulouse and specializing in electromagnetic simulation and studies for marine, space, defence and aeronautics domains applications.
Two years ago, Nexio Simulation applied to HPC-PME, the French initiative to bring HPC to SMEs, for early porting on OpenMP/MPI of their in-house software called CAPITOLE-EM. They received support for HPC and applied math experts in CALMIP and INP-ENSEEIHT after which they applied to the PRACE SHAPE Pilot for scaling out to PRACE resources. They were awarded 200,000 core hours on MareNostrum at BSC, Spain.
While the maximum size of simulation was about 500,000 unknowns in 2011, Nexio was able to simulate 6 million unknowns thanks to the use of PRACE Tier-0 resources and support. This major improvement allowed Nexio to win two major contracts with Japanese aerospace companies and to port their application on Cloud Services using the Fortissimo project.
“Nexio Simulation’s success in scaling out to ever larger HPC systems, illustrates clearly the complementarity of regional/national initiatives with European initiatives like the PRACE SHAPE programme or the Fortissimo project,” said Sergi Girona, Chair of the PRACE Board of Directors.
The official announcement of the eighth round of IDC Innovation Excellence Awards can be found here: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25250214
More on the SHAPE project by Nexio Simulation can be found here: http://www.prace-ri.eu/shape-nexio/
More detailed results of this project, as well as the other 10 first SHAPE projects are available on the PRACE website: http://www.prace-ri.eu/shape-pilot-projects/
About Nexio Simulation
Since 2005, Nexio Simulation develops simulation software in electromagnetism. CAPITOLE-EM software is the result a of long experience gained thanks to research projects in many industrial fields such as defence, aerospace, space, marine, etc. It offers outstanding performance in terms of speed and memory space saving, which allows an easy use by everyone, and especially for SMEs. Nexio Simulation joined NEXIO Group (http://www.nexiogroup.com) in 2012, specialized in electromagnetic compatibility. Nexio Simulation becomes the Simulation Software cluster of the Group and allows pooling expertise to provide a range of comprehensive solutions.
About SHAPE
SHAPE, the SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe is a pan-European, PRACE-based programme supporting HPC adoption by SMEs. The Programme aims to raise awareness and equip European SMEs with the expertise necessary to take advantage of the innovation possibilities opened up by High Performance Computing (HPC), thus increasing their competitiveness. http://www.prace-ri.eu/shape
About PRACE
The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 4 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement RI-312763. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu
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Source: PRACE