HPC-EUROPA2

Pan-European Research infrastructure on High Performance Computing for 21st century Science

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The main objective of HPC-Europa2 is to continue the provision of a high quality service for transnational access to the advanced HPC systems available in Europe. This activity has been available on an ongoing basis as a highly-rated and trusted service for almost two decades. The HPC-Europa2 partnership includes as Transnational Access centres CINECA (Italy), BSC (Spain), EPCC (UK), HLRS (Germany), SARA (The Netherlands), CINES ( France) and CSC (Finland). The project is organised around its core activity, the Transnational Access (TA) HPC service provision. Over the four year life span of the action, the TA will provide HPC services, specialist support, scientific tutoring and opportunities for collaboration to more than 1,000 European researchers. This very large community of users will be provided with more than 22 million of CPU hours of computing time. A number of Networking activities are implemented around the core business of the project; to interact with the HPC ecosystem in Europe, mainly represented by DEISA and PRACE; to coordinate the transnational access activities carried on by the different partners; and to coordinate the activities related to user support, consultancy support and the diffusion and dissemination of the HPC culture. Three Joint Research Activities are also integrated into the project; to provide innovative solutions for parallel computing on massive parallel architectures; to develop tools for scientific data services offering ease of access, analysis and visualisation of complex distributed data sets; and to create a virtual cluster environment which enables researchers to prepare and familiarise themselves with the HPC environment in advance of their visit, thus increasing the effectiveness and productivity of transnational access visits.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Supercomputers are powerful research tools, but access to these high-performance machines is not open to everyone in the scientific community. One European project provided hundreds of researchers with access to the latest, state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

High-performance computing (HPC) is also appropriately known as supercomputing. The current generation of supercomputers uses two architectures: grid and cluster computing. Cluster computing employs a large number of powerful processors in close proximity to each other. For its part, grid computing distributes its processing across a wide network of computers, often utilising the space capacity of idle machines.

Supercomputers are used to crunch mind-boggling amounts of numbers to perform the complex calculations required in a number of data-intensive fields. These include weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modelling, quantum mechanics and astronomy.

However, there are plenty of applications for which the power of HPCs can be harnessed, but the researchers involved lack the computational resources or know-how. The 'Pan-European research infrastructure on high performance computing for 21st century science' (HPC-Europa2) sought to level the playing field and enable a greater pool of European researchers to tap into the power of supercomputers.

Funded by the Research Infrastructures action of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the project built on two decades of experience in providing transnational access to European HPC facilities. HPC-Europa2 aimed to extend HPC services, equivalent to 22 million CPU hours, specialist support, scientific tutoring and collaboration opportunities to over 1 000 European researchers.

In all, HPC-Europa2 organised about1000 visits lasting up to three months (plus around 80 virtual visits) for researchers to some of Europe's top supercomputing facilities. Each beneficiary also enjoyed access to a host researcher working locally in a related field, who provided office space and specialised scientific tutoring.

In addition, a number of joint research activities were carried out in the context of the project. These sought to contribute to the development of emerging HPC programming models. They also aimed to develop basic tools that would improve the quality of information extracted from data. In addition, they strove to create a virtual cluster environment that would enable visiting researchers to make the most of their visits.

Democratising the availability of supercomputing in this way and enlarge and prepare the user base to become ready for exascale HPC is bound to promote advancement in many fields for the benefit of society overall.