SCIENCE

The DEISA PRACE Symposium 2011 was once again held 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 representatives, EC representatives to industry partners. The event gathered more than 200 participants from 26 countries. This symposium was held from April 13 to April 14 in Helsinki, at the National Museum of Finland, and was hosted by CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. 

Prominent keynote speakers from all over the world presented extreme computing technologies and challenges in computational science. Speakers on the first day included Zoran Stancic of the European Commission, Leena Vestala of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Finland) Achim Bachem, Coordinator of PRACE (Germany), Thom Dunning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), Xue-bin Chi from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (China), and David Keyes from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia).

During the sessions on ‘Challenges in Computational Science’, speakers from different scientific communities which are supported by DEISA and are planning to use the services provided by the PRACE Research Infrastructure presented their recent findings using HPC. The scientific fields covered were astrophysics, quantum computing, space research, engineering, climate research, materials science, biophysics, life sciences, turbulence, nuclear physics, chemistry, and bio-engineering. Speakers from the DEISA project presented highlights of the DEISA project, which ends in April 2011. Tier-1 services as provided by DEISA will be integrated in the PRACE Research Infrastructure (RI). The first call for combined Tier-0 and Tier-1 resources, starting on May 2, 2011, was also announced during the symposium.

The symposium also included the first PRACE User Forum. In this session PRACE representatives presented the services the PRACE RI offers to European scientists. The session ended with a panel discussion where HPC users expressed their opinions about the services of PRACE RI and the future of the PRACE User Forum. A group of HPC users from different scientific areas was established in order to facilitate fruitful PRACE User Forums in the future. The activities for the creation of a sustainable User Forum will be followed up by PRACE together with the group of users established during the first User Forum and other users from various scientific fields that have HPC needs for advancing their research work.

The Symposia series was carried out as DEISA Symposia in 2005 in Paris, 2006 in Bologna, 2007 in Munich, 2008 in Edinburgh, and was continued as DEISA PRACE Symposia 2009 in Amsterdam, 2010 in Barcelona and 2011 in Helsinki.

All presentations from the symposium are available at the DEISA and PRACE websites: 
http://www.prace-ri.eu/DEISA-PRACE-Symposium-2011
http://www.deisa.eu/news_press/symposium/Helsinki2011

In continuation of the successful DEISA PRACE Symposia series, the PRACE Day 2012 is scheduled to be held during ISC’12 in Hamburg, Germany.  

More information: www.prace-ri.eu, www.deisa.eu/