Here is a collection of highlights from this week’s news stream as reported by HPCwire.

Atmospheric and Environmental Research to Support NOAA Weather and Climate Models

Allinea Integrates Cray’s Support into Its Distributed Debugging Tool

RAID Inc. Launches 1U Fusion GPU-Optimized Supercomputing Solution

BlueArc Accelerates Next-Generation Genome Sequencing

Acceleware Announces Partnership with Paradigm

Supercomputing Helping Fight Disease, One Molecule at a Time

SGI Releases Next Generation COPAN 400 Storage Platform

New IBM Research Lab to Open in Brazil

Dell, Terascala Partner on HPC Storage Solution

Zircon Computing, Numerical Algorithms Group Announce Case Study Results

NASA, Japan Announce Cloud Computing Collaboration

DataDirect, Cray to Deploy Storage Solutions for Strategic Supercomputing Projects

Construction to Start on NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center

NCAR Modeling Shows Oil Likely to Reach Atlantic Coast

PRACE Gets Off the Ground

The petascale PRACE architecture that we’ve been hearing about for some time had its official inauguration this week in Barcelona. The EC Deputy Director General Zoran Stancic and representatives of the 19 participating nations were at the ceremony to establish the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, aka PRACE.

From the announcement:

Four nations have agreed to provide 400 million Euro to implement supercomputers with a combined computing power in the multi petaflop/s range over the next five years. This funding is complemented by up to 70 million Euros from the European Commission which is supporting the preparation and implementation of this infrastructure. These leadership class systems will help European scientists and engineers to remain internationally competitive.

PRACE is an international non-profit association, headquartered in Brussels. There are 19 members, including Austria, Bulgaria, Cryprus, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK. Norway will be joining PRACE by June 30, and other countries are also welcome.
 
The PRACE HPC service will consist of up to six top-level supercomputing systems, each providing several petaflops of computing power. The project aims to acheieve exaflop computing power by 2019. Experts are available to support users with porting, scaling and optimizing applications for parallel architectures. A training program is also available to offer scientists and students how to best make use of the advanced infrastructure. A scientific committee is available to provide advice and will operate alongside a peer review process, via which access to specific resources will be granted.

The PRACE infrastructure is already in operation. The first system is the one-petaflop JUGENE system in Julich, Germany. More production systems are to follow. The First Implementation Phase of the project (PRACE-1IP) starts on July 1, 2010.

Professor Achim Bachem, Chairman at the Forschungszentrum Jülich and coordinator of PRACE preparatory phase project, stated: “Science and industry needs computing power and knowledge on the highest level. The collective European effort provided by PRACE will help European researchers to reach out to unique scientific insights and innovative products,” expressed Professor Achim Bachem, Chairman at the Forschungszentrum Jülich and coordinator of PRACE preparatory phase project.

For a further look at how the project is being funded, check out this article at eWeek Europe.

Intel, imac and Flemish Universities Open ExaScience Lab

After ISC’10 last week, it seems everyone is talking exascale. Not to be outdone, Intel, imec and a handful of Flemish universities have announced the ExaScience lab, which, evident from its name, will develop software to run on future exascale computer systems. The Intel-based machines will deliver 1,000 times the performance of today’s fastest supercomputers, using up to 1 million cores and 1 billion processes.

Was there a PetaScience lab? Or does Exa- just make for a better prefix? Regardless, the Flanders ExaScience Lab opened this week at the imec research facilities in Leuven, Belgium, where it is the latest member of Intel’s European research network, Intel Labs Europe.

Current computer technology is not quite up to the exascale challenge; machines would run too hot and require too much energy. Therefore, a complete reworking of software and programming methods will be necessary to bring energy requirements and fault tolerance within acceptable levels. Power and reliability are key challenges, but the rewards of being able to model extremely complex systems are to big to ignore. Such detailed simulations could lead to cures for diseases and better disaster prediction systems, and much more in the way of benefits to humanity.

Luc Van den hove, president and CEO of imec, shared his thoughts on the project:

We are excited about this unique collaboration with Intel and five Flemish universities here at imec. By sharing our expertise, I’m convinced that the Flanders ExaScience Lab will bring valuable software solutions for Intel’s future exascale computers. I would like to express my thanks to the Flemish government, Flanders Investment and Trade and the IWT for supporting this lab, and I’m looking forward to this long-term strategic partnership.

The Flanders ExaScience Lab employs almost two dozen researchers and plans to add another dozen by 2012. The lab is supported by the Flemish Government agency for innovation by science and technology (IWT).