SCIENCE

DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, and PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, for the first time merged their annual science symposia into one big European HPC event: The DEISA PRACE Symposium 2009. This symposium took place from May 11 to May 13 in Amsterdam, and was hosted by SARA and NCF at the Royal Tropical Institute.

The theme of this unique symposium was "HPC Infrastructures for Petascale Applications". This is what PRACE and DEISA are jointly creating for Europe - and what other organisations and projects are building in the USA and Asia. The symposium was of major interest to a broad audience: from scientific users, HPC technology experts and vendors, government representatives and industry partners.

Prominent keynote speakers from all over the world gave the global perspectives of High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Petascale era, the new generation of supercomputers for scientific research. Speakers on the first day included Kostas Glinos of the European Commission, Abani Patra from the National Science Foundation (USA), Ryutaro Himeno from RIKEN (Japan), Horst Simon from the Department of Energy (USA), Ben Evans from the Australian National University (Australia) and Vladimir Voevodin from the Moscow State University (Russia).

The symposium also featured speakers from different science communities.
"High-performance computing is crucial for climate research to understand mechanisms of climate change and predict future climate change perturbed by human activities. The powerful computing is needed to understand and to predict extreme events and assess the regional impacts of the climate change on society and economy", stated Prof. Sylvie Joussaume, researcher at CNRS and expert in climate modelling. She is also chairing the European Network for Earth System modelling (ENES). ENES has started the new FP7 Infrastructure project IS-ENES to better understand and predict future climate change by high-end simulations.

In the Life Science community talk Prof. Peter Coveney from University College London presented the Virtual Physiological Human project with collaborations from seven European countries.

Prof. Frank Jenko from the European Fusion Research community, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, presented an overview of the world-wide ITER project and the HPC needs for its success.

Prof. Carlos Frenk from Durham University gave a brilliant insight into the world of cosmology and the challenging simulations of cosmic evolution by the VIRGO Consortium, the world-leading group in this field.

All four science communities are supported by DEISA and plan to use the PRACE petaflop systems.

PRACE also provided its perspectives on HPC architectures, Applications, Training and Education.

From the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative ten computational science grand challenge projects from all over Europe covering many science areas were presented.

The presentations from the symposium are available on the DEISA and PRACE web sites (http://www.deisa.eu/news_press/symposium and http://www.prace-project.eu/documents).

More information: Please contact deisa-prace-symposium-contact (at)fz-juelich.de