high-performance computing
➤ A European approach to buying supercomputers? Bassini remarked that to ‘maintain Europe as a world class contributor in science’ governments and organisations like Prace ‘must ensure that they can offer access to leading HPC systems.’ He assured delegates that: ‘Prace aims to offer at least one system in each architectural class.’ Currently, Prace is dependent on HPC
infrastructure bought and owned by EU member states. However, there was a growing recognition, Burgueño Arjona suggested, that that the member-state/individual approach might not be enough to create a European approach that was both effective and economic. Te Commission would be monitoring the
HPC market and R&D landscape in Europe in the course of this year and would report to the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament by the end of 2015 on the steps that should be taken aſter that. In addition, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) was being invited to look at the issue and to propose ways of better coordinating the investments being made by individual member states. Research and innovation in Europe needed world-class computing capability, Burgueño
BUDGET, COMPUTER SIZE, AND HEAD-COUNT ARE NOT INDICATORS OF EXCELLENCE
Arjona assured his audience. Te European Commission needed to be careful not to be seen to be favouring one commercial company over another (something that does not appear to trouble the USA in its procurement of the Coral project), but Burgueño Arjona did point out that some 700 million euros would be available through the EU’s Horizon 2020 research programme for public-private partnerships with the commercially led European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC).
Japan supports HPC for industry Despite very different political structures, both Europe and Japan have come to very similar conclusions about how best to improve access to high-performance computing (HPC): HPC resources must be shared and not monopolised by the individual owners of the computer systems themselves. And just as Europe has set up Prace, so Japan has created the Research Organisation for Information Science and Technology (RIST) to coordinate that process of sharing. However, in one significant area the two
18 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
Prace speakers receive a token of appreciation from Prace (Left to right: Masihiro Seki, Sanzio Bassini, JC Desplat, William Sellers, Sascha Husa and Ange Caruso)
regions differ strongly in their policy: in Japan, compute cycles on the country’s foremost HPC systems are offered to industry to conduct commercially sensitive work, without the industrial partners having to openly publish the results of the project, as is the case in the pan-European access system, according to Masahiro Seki, president of RIST. Both Prace and RIST offer computational
cycles to industry, but RIST proposes a much better deal to those concerned about protecting sensitive information – a key selling point for many industrial users. In certain circumstances, industrial users of RIST do not need to publish the entirety of their results; instead they can keep their own IP safe from public view. A second point of difference is the degree
of support for users that has been put in place by RIST. Seki said: ‘RIST provides 17 scientific consultants, with seven consultants in Kobe, six in Tokyo. Te Tokyo office is setup for the support of industrial users.’ By providing consultants RIST is providing some expertise to groups of users that may understand their chosen field very well but may not have the skill s and knowledge required to operate HPC systems. Because RIST provides knowledge in areas such as code optimisation, industrial users can concentrate on the specific challenges that face them without having to worry about the HPC systems themselves.
HPC’s benefits to industry in small countries Te host nation, Ireland, used PRACEdays15 to demonstrate the benefits that its own industries can realise by using HPC. Jean-Christophe Desplat, Director of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), stressed the importance of international cooperation to further European supercomputing and its role in economic development.
Nonetheless, he warned that ‘computer
modelling is still struggling to be accepted as a mandatory and cost-effective methodology in some countries.’ Te attitude appeared to be, sometimes, that it was all very well for large companies such as Boeing in the USA, but organisations such as Prace and his own ICHEC had to make HPC more relevant to smaller companies with smaller budgets. He particularly stressed the important of the
‘P’ in Prace’s title: as a Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. Although Ireland is one of the smaller European countries, it is able to make a positive contribution, he maintained: ‘Excellence does not know borders. Budget, computer size, and head-count are not indicators of excellence. Just because your system is not in the Top500, does not mean you do not have excellent people in these countries or organisations.’ Among the projects that ICHEC has
worked on in partnership with Prace was one from Tullow Oil, a multinational oil and gas exploration company founded in Tullow, some 35 miles south of Dublin in Ireland, but now with its corporate headquarters in London. It relies on seismic imaging to locate oil supplies buried deep in rocks under the sea and on land. Sean Delaney, a computational physicist at Tullow Oil, told a special session of PRACEdays15 on ‘HPC in Ireland’, that a lot goes into the infrastructure behind seismic imaging in addition to the complex algorithms and physics. Delaney said: ‘Each boat has a basically a small HPC centre on board, constantly monitoring things and making sure that the data is coming in as expected in addition to performing some initial processing and analysis.’ Tis process generates large amounts of
data and in reality the growth in demand for computational resources almost always
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