SCIENCE

Close to 90 PRACE project members met for a mid-term all hands meeting of the PRACE project at the Research Center Jülich (FZJ) on February 12-13, 2009. Prof. Achim Bachem, Chairman of the Board of FZJ and Coordinator of the PRACE project welcomed the participants from all project partners and from the PRACE initiative. He thanked the project members for their dedication and commitment. Nearly 250 persons contributed to the results that have been submitted to the European Commission in the first year of the project.

"Building on the team spirit and trust of the first year PRACE will achieve its ambitious goal to prepare the creation of a permanent HPC research infrastructure for Europe by the end of 2009", Bachem stated.

The eight work package leaders briefly presented the achievements of 2008 and details of the planned work for 2009, especially related to collaboration with other work packages. These presentations set the stage for parallel intra work package sessions to fine tune the activities of each work package for the upcoming deliverables and milestones. A joint dinner was an excellent opportunity for informal discussions, to meet new colleagues, and to put a face to email senders and telcon voices.

The second day was devoted to inter project sessions. They were especially designed to link the administrative tasks on legal form, governance, funding, and peer review to the technical work on system selection and evaluation, application tuning and benchmarking, including operations and systems management. In addition, all technical work packages met to synchronise interdependencies between their tasks.

This two day workshop was an important step towards the successful completion of the PRACE project at the end of 2009.