Press release

For release: 28/05/2010

DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010 attracted Participants from 23 countries

The DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010 was held for the second time as a big European HPC (High Performance Computing) event. The symposium featured speakers from different scientific communities as well as decision makers in science. The symposium was of major interest to a broad audience: from scientific users, HPC technology experts and vendors, government, EC representatives and industry partners. It gathered more than 130 participants from 23 countries and three continents. This symposium was held from May 10 to May 12 at Casa Milà, in Barcelona, and hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

In the sessions on ‘Challenges in Computational Science’, speakers from different science communities which are supported by DEISA and are planning to use the PRACE Petaflop/s systems were featured. The covered science fields were astrophysics, materials sciences, earth sciences, fusion for energy, and life sciences. DEISA and PRACE speakers reported on project progress and highlights, and PRACE speakers discussed the future technologies.  In further science sessions, 14 computational science grand-challenge projects from all over Europe and various disciplines were presented.

Prominent keynote speakers from all over the world presented extreme computing technologies and challenges in computational sciences. Speakers on the first day included Kostas Glinos of the European Commission, Montserrat Torné of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain), José Muñoz from National Science Foundation (USA), Akira Ukawa from the University of Tsukuba (Japan), Thomas Zacharia from the Department of Energy (USA) and Catherine Rivière from GENCI (France).

"Access to capability computers of leadership class is essential for international competitiveness in science and engineering. We have not sustained HPC service beyond the national scale and we have not coordination of procurements. DEISA was the first project that clustered national resources and provided a fraction of their capacity to European users. PRACE will continue these efforts installing European HPC facilities at the top of a computing pyramid, providing unique tools to the European scientific community, boosting European competitiveness and positioning itself strategically as a leader rather than follower in the HPC world", stated Francesc Subirada, Associate Director of BSC.

All presentations from the symposium are available on the DEISA and PRACE websites: http://www.deisa.eu/news_press/symposium/barcelona2010 and

http://www.prace-project.eu/documents.

In continuation of the successful DEISA PRACE Symposia series, the DEISA PRACE Symposium 2011 is scheduled for April 6-7 to be held in Helsinki hosted by CSC – IT Center for Science.

About DEISA: In EU FP7, the DEISA Consortium continues to support and further develop the distributed high performance computing infrastructure and its services through the DEISA2 project funded for three more years as of May 2008. Activities and services relevant for Applications Enabling, Operation, and Technologies are continued and further enhanced, as these are indispensable for the effective support of computational sciences in the HPC area.

About PRACE: The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) prepares the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, consisting of several tier-0 centres providing European researchers with access to capability computers and forming the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. The PRACE project receives funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-211528.

About BSC: The BSC-CNS (Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is the National Supercomputing Facility in Spain and was officially constituted in April 2005. BSC-CNS manages MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located at the Torre Girona chapel. The mission of BSC-CNS is to investigate, develop and manage information technology in order to facilitate scientific progress. With this aim, special dedication has been taken to areas such as Computer Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computer Applications in Sciences and Engineering.