May 11, 2022 — The ISC Invited Program explores the developments that HPC and adjacent technologies are currently experiencing and predicts future trends, allowing users and vendors to make informed decisions. The invited program topics are normally proposed by experts and practitioners in various domains. This year’s Distinguished Speaker Series will feature the following speakers and topics.
Speaker: Marija Vranic
Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal
Topic: Simulating Intense Lasers and Plasmas: Opportunities and Numerical Challenges
Date: Tuesday, May 31
Description: The next generation of lasers will access intensities above 10^23 W/cm^2. When plasmas or relativistic electron beams interact with these lasers, energy loss due to radiation emission, or quantum effects such as electron-positron pair creation become important for their dynamics. Repeated occurrence of pair creation can induce a so-called “QED cascade”, that generates an exponentially rising number of particles. This allows for creating exotic plasmas that are a mix of electrons, ions, positrons, energetic photons and intense background fields. Extreme laser-plasma interactions can be explored to form optical traps, create&accelerate particles and produce novel radiation sources. I will introduce a QED module coupled with the massively particle-in-cell framework OSIRIS that allows studying nonlinear plasma dynamics in the transition from the classical to the quantum-dominated regime of interaction. Simulating these enviroments brings novel computational challenges, which will be discussed along with the proposed solutions.
Speaker: Philipp Slusallek
Director & Member of the Executive Board at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Topic: Digital Reality: From Learned Models Via Synthetic Data to Trusted-AI — And Back!
Date: Tuesday, May 31
Description: In order for AI systems to make the right decisions, they need to accurately “understand” the complex reality of the world around them. Directly learning models from observed data is often really hard or even impossible. Instead we need to take a modular approach of independently learning partial models of many different aspects of the world and putting them together as needed. Simulations — not only of the partial Models but also including the sensors of the AI system — then allows for generating exactly the synthetic data required for specific use cases. This can involve training of AI systems but also benchmarking, validation and — most important for industry — certification of “Trusted-AI” systems that provide guarantees about their functionality. But these “Trusted-AI“ systems also need to understand what they do not understand about their environment with the goal of improving their digital models about reality. In this talk, I will describe “Digital Reality”, a comprehensive approach developed at DFKI that combines modeling, simulation, AI and high-performance computing in an unique and integrated way.
Speaker: Anders Dam Jensen
Executive Director, European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking
Topic: The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) – Leading The Way In European Supercomputing
Date: Wednesday, June 1
Description: Anders will present his organization, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). The EuroHPC JU joins together the resources of the European Union, 31 European countries and 3 private partners to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe. Anders will present the first operational EuroHPC supercomputers located across Europe and give details about their access policy.
Anders will then present some of the JU’s missions, such as the acquisition of new supercomputers including exascale systems and quantum computers, the implementation of an ambitious research and innovation program supporting European technological and digital autonomy and developing green technologies in HPC, the further strengthening of Europe’s leading position in HPC applications, and the launch of the first pan European Master of Science program in HPC, part of the effort of the JU to broaden the use of HPC in Europe.
Speaker: Christof Schuette
President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), Research Center for Computing and Data Science
Topic: NHR – Germany’s Response to the Transformation in HPC
Date: Wednesday, June 1
Description: The German federal and state governments have agreed to jointly fund the National High-Performance Computing Alliance (NHR) with 600 million euros. NHR is a national network of tier-2 HPC centers with concerted efforts regarding the whole spectrum of HPC from infrastructure, and software, to method development and applications. NHR focuses on excellent research, consulting, services, and training for the HPC community, understanding that scientific innovation with benefits to society often requires high-quality support and sufficient capacity rather than a race for the largest supercomputer. The alliance is broad enough to provide solutions for traditional HPC applications as well as for Big Data, AI and new forms of demand from scientific communities with previously little HPC affinity. The talk will give insights into the structure and organization of NHR as well as into projects and new developments.
Visit the ISC 22 Invited Program event page for more details.
Source: ISC 22