SCIENCE

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, organised a one-day seminar titled “Industrial Competitiveness: Europe goes HPC”. The seminar targeted large European companies with potential interest in High Performance Computing (HPC) for increasing their competitiveness and productivity and to accelerate innovation. The 1st PRACE Industry Seminar was hosted by the city of Amsterdam, in the NH Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky on September 3rd, 2008. The seminar had close to 100 invited attendees, CEO’s, CIO’s, CTO’s and high level decision makers from different industrial domains as well as academic participants, scientific software developers and representation from the European Commission. This attendance represented a total of 13 European countries. One of PRACE’s targets is to increase the interest for high-end computing and its potential for competitiveness as well as to raise awareness of the creation of a world class computing infrastructure in Europe for HPC applications. The participating companies were: EDF, Repsol, ENI, CEA, Iberdrola, Total, GM, Porsche, Scania, Airbus, BAE, SNECMA, EADS, VOLVO AERO, Schering Plough, Novartis, AkzoNobel, Arcelor Mittal, Hutchinson, Phlilips, NXP, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Alcatel Lucent, Renater, Cerfacs, CS, EDS, T-Systems, TER@TEC, Acumen, Gnodal, NAG, Allinea Numtech and RISC. The participants enjoyed a rich program enlighting the ideas to create a world class HPC infrastructure in Europe and with numerous examples of very beneficial industrial use of HPC. As a result of the seminar, industrial pilot applications suitable for Petaflop/s scalability are planned to be run with the PRACE prototype systems. PRACE also collected needs and expectations from the attendees during discussions and will arrange follow up meetings with interested attendees. “The PRACE process of establishing contacts with industry in the first phases of this big European research project is for me very appropriate. The First Industry Seminar obviously showed that very positive synergies can be exploited between research and industry about high performance computing and numerical simulation”, said Jean Francois Hamelin CIO of EDF R&D one of the major energy suppliers in Europe. The first industry seminar will be followed by a second one in 2009. In the second industry seminar PRACE will discuss models for HPC usage through industry and other forms of cooperation in more depth. It is also planned to widen the scope and also involve small and medium size enterprises (SME’s), an important and more widespread group of future users of HPC in business. PRACE will also organise two scientific seminars, the first one to take place on November 26th in Lyon, France. The scientific seminars are aimed for potential academic HPC users. More information: The organising committee will give more information upon request. E-mail: prace-industry@fz-juelich.de The presentations from the “Industrial Competitiveness: Europe goes HPC” are available on its Web site. Anni Jakobsson (anni.jakobsson@csc.fi) and Tim Robinson (robinson@cscs.ch) will give more information about the first PRACE scientific seminar. Information about the seminar is also available on its Web site.