SCIENCE

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, a consortium of the 16 leading supercomputing centers in Europe, will arrange a seminar for potential industry users in Toulouse, France, on Sept. 7-8, 2009. The seminar will focus on industrial needs and expectations of the future European High Performance Computing (HPC) Infrastructure.

Close to 150 invited participants, especially decision makers are expected to attend the event including representatives from aerospace, car manufacturing, energy, chemicals, drug design and medical industry, metal industry, bioinformatics, telecommunication companies, finance, insurance, as well as HPC vendors, scientific software developers and service companies, and EC representatives. During the seminar participants will receive first hand information about the planned PRACE research infrastructure, services and usage.

Jean Marc Thomas, Vice President Airbus France, will present examples of success stories about HPC usage of European aerospace industry. Also European Small and Medium Size companies will present their suggestions how PRACE could help increasing their competitiveness. High Performance Computing is becoming more and more important for global companies that need to stay ahead of their competition -- both in offering innovative products and services. Supercomputers are developing rapidly through the combination of technological advances and the rising stress of competition. This evolution requires continuous high investments. However, reports show that performance levels of the most powerful supercomputers used in industry are around six to seven years behind the world's fastest systems. The US is currently making a concerted effort to shorten this gap and to secure the leading position of its economy by granting industrial access to publicly owned supercomputers.

The seminar contains four parallel sessions which will allow participants to discuss about their needs and expectations regarding the PRACE infrastructure and services, such as organisation and business models, network and security, relations with independent software vendors and license cost and finally user support and training needs.

The four parallel sessions will allow participants to have in depth discussions on industrial needs and expectations about the upcoming PRACE Infrastructure and associated services. Session 1 "Organisation and business models" will be dedicated to discussions on when and how industrial users could use the PRACE Infrastructure. Different usage models will be discussed: one model is "buying" CPU hours (On Demand Computing) for production purposes with strong SLA (Service Level Agreements); another is a collaborative R&D where industrial users are accessing HPC facilities for free with the condition of communicating on the results obtained.

Session 2 "Networking, security and confidentiality" will focus on accessing the PRACE Infrastructure (network cost, latency, band with) and the levels of security and confidentiality regarding the information exchanged or stored at the PRACE Tier-0 centers.

Session 3 "User support and training" will focus on user support, service level agreements (porting and optimisation of industrial applications, visualisation, open source migration) and training needs. Session 4 "Relations with independent software vendors" will concentrate on commercial software usage of the PRACE Infrastructure, software licenses costs, and the definition of independent software vendors. A new model of licensing the usage will also be discussed.

PRACE second industry seminar "Europe goes HPC" is organized by GENCI and GAUSS with the sponsorship of Airbus and Grand Toulouse.

Some of the companies that are going to participate the PRACE industry workshops are: Airbus, EDF, ONERA, Novartis, Aureus Pharma, TOTAL, Repsol, BNP Paribas, SNECMA, CS, ENI, Eurodecision, HydrOcean, FFT, Michelin, Arcelor Mittal, MUREX, Porsche, BMW and Renault Formula 1, to name a few.