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October 7, 2009 - Europe’s HPC infrastructure DEISA has announced the latest resource allocations on Europe’s most powerful supercomputers. Fifty scientific projects have been awarded supercomputing resources totalling more than 60 million processor hours, through the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative.

These DEISA Extreme Computing (DECI) projects will each have access to resources at one or more of the 11 DEISA partner sites which operate fourteen of the Top 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world, including the only two European computers in the Top 10.

Through DECI, now in its fifth year, scientists are tackling a wide range of scientific challenges in materials science, astronomical science, particle and plasma physics, earth sciences, biological sciences and engineering. Successful projects are chosen for their potential to achieve ground-breaking scientific results through the use of supercomputers, enabling them to run more detailed and accurate simulations of scientific problems than was previously possible. Multi-national proposals are especially encouraged and the latest projects to be supported include RBflow, an engineering project with ten partners from four countries in Europe, the USA, Japan and China, and SolarAct, an astronomy collaboration with involving researchers from four European countries and from the USA. Staff from DEISA will work closely with the researchers on each project, providing specialist applications support to optimise the scientific codes and deploy them on the most appropriate architecture.

Alison Kennedy, Coordinator of DECI said, “DEISA is delighted to be able to provide compute resources and applications enabling assistance to researchers in so many innovative projects. This year, we attracted 75 proposals from 21 European countries. This shows the wide appeal and relevance of DECI across Europe.”

Dr Janis Rimshans, the first Latvian DECI applicant said “DEISA support for our project related to simulation of critical phenomena in many-particle systems is very important in supplying us with access to new architectures and technologies, which up to now have been inaccessible for us.”

About DEISA

DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) is a consortium of leading national Supercomputing Centres in Europe to advance computational sciences in the area of supercomputing. The consortium has deployed and operates a complex and heterogeneous high performance computing infrastructure at a continental scale with an aggregated peak performance of over one PetaFlop/s. About 180 European research institutes and universities have already benefited from the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, involving 25 European countries and four more continents. The DEISA Consortium is continuing its services through EU FP7 support for the DEISA2 project with the goal to provide a turnkey operational solution for a persistent European HPC service.

Contacts

• Contact for DECI: Alison Kennedy , EPCC Deputy Director
  e: a.kennedy@epcc.ed.ac.uk
  t: +44 (0)131 650 5958
• Contact for DEISA: www.deisa.eu
• Information about the DECI-5 projects http://www.deisa.eu/science/deci/projects2009-2010/science/deci/projects2009-2010

Acknowledgment