A supercomputer infrastructure for the whole of europe
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When it comes to climate modelling, molecular biology or materials research, scientists need to have increasingly powerfulcomputers at their disposal in order to be able to simulate complex systems in a realistic manner. “The great leaps of understanding in the future will come about with the help of the simulation sciences,” explains Professor Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The Helmholtz Centre not only has one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the IBM Blue Gene computer JUGENE, but is also promoting a Europe-wide network.
In the “Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe” project a total of 16 partner countries are constructing a joint supercomputer infrastructure for research purposes. Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK are cooperating in the PRACE consortium. They have recently been joined by Turkey and Ireland. The German representative in PRACE is the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, which coordinates the activities of the three high-performance computing centres in Jülich, Stuttgart and Garching. In this way researchers from the whole of Europe will have access to supercomputer performance at the top international level, which national computing centres simply cannot provide. Yet until then much remains to be done. Hardware and software will have to be coordinated throughout Europe, prototypes for future supercomputers will have to be developed and tested.
At the same time the installation of the first petaflop systems at Forschungszentrum Jülich is in the pipeline. Besides customising hardware and software, the user support is also changing to high-level community-oriented support through simulation laboratories and targeted workshops. “This will enable our scientists and many European colleagues to further strengthen their leading position in the field of simulation sciences”, Lippert explains.
