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Abstract:
Alongside theory and experiment, simulation has become a third pillar of modern science. But simulating everything from the effects of climate change to astrophysics takes some serious computing power. An
EU-funded project is helping to put unprecedented supercomputing resources at scientists' fingertips.

Partnering for pan-European supercomputing

Brussels, Belgium | Posted on March 25th, 2012

Established in May 2010 as a non-profit association, the Partnership for
Advanced Computing (PRACE) is today one of the world's leading providers of High
Performance Computing (HPC) to the scientific community. By pooling national
investments in several European countries, the partnership is providing
researchers across Europe with internet-based access to computing resources for
a wide range of applications in almost any scientific field. Its roll-out is
being supported by the ‘PRACE first implementation project' PRACE-1IP, backed by EUR 20 million in funding from the European Commission, just one of the several implementation phases
planned for the coming years.

'Simulation is used in almost any discipline to try to tackle many of the big challenges facing science or
society,' explains Dr. Thomas Eickermann at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre in
Germany. 'We need HPC systems to model weather patterns and climate change, to
study diseases and drug effects, to design new materials, in astronomy and even
to model new aircraft designs... the list is almost endless.'

Dr. Eickermann is managing PRACE-1IP in which partners from 21 European countries
are working to improve access for researchers to the supercomputing resources
available through PRACE. A key part of their work is focused on developing technologies and techniques to help researchers run applications on the PRACE HPC machines. This includes porting - adapting applications so they can be used in a computing environment different from the one for which they
were originally designed - and petascaling - optimising applications to run on
the extremely large number of processors of HPC machines.

'Though PRACE is a big step forward in making supercomputing resources available to a wide
segment of the European scientific community, inevitably there is still more
demand from researchers for HPC resources than there are HPC resources
available,' Dr. Eickermann says. 'Therefore the projects that get to use the
resources have to be carefully chosen and we have to ensure that they use those
resources as efficiently as possible.'

Within PRACE, who gets to use the HPC resources is determined by a peer-review process; fellow scientists and researchers select the most promising projects following a twice-yearly call for
proposals. Once selected, the work of the PRACE-1IP project team helps ensure
the researchers get the most out of the resources available.

In that regard, the PRACE-1IP project and a follow-up initiative, PRACE-2IP, are setting
up six training centres across Europe to educate researchers in HPC systems in a
multi-year program that covers everything from programming parallel computing
systems and scaling applications to programming accelerators such as ‘General
purpose graphics processing units' (GP-GPUs).

The PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATCs) will be hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre
in Spain, CINECA-Consorzio Interuniversitario in Italy, CSC-IT Centre for Science in Finland, EPCC at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing in Germany, and Maison de la Simulation in France. Researchers interested in attending courses can obtain information from the PRACE website (www.prace-ri.eu) and from the training centre host sites.

'Contemporary HPC systems offer unprecedented computing power and their architectures are constantly evolving. The ongoing challenge has always been to "up-skill" scientists and programmers
so as to maximise efficiency and research output on such systems,' explains Dr.
Simon Wong, leader of the training work package in PRACE-2IP (the second
implementation phase project, currently ongoing) and the head of Education and
Training at ICHEC in Ireland.

Another key element of the project is keeping abreast of the latest developments and technologies in the HPC world and continually upgrading hardware and software at the partner supercomputing sites.
Currently, PRACE has installed three so-called Tier-0 systems with three
more to follow in 2012 at sites in Germany, Spain, France and Italy which are
offering a major part of their resources to pan-European research. It also has
numerous so-called Tier-1 sites that are mostly dedicated to national or
regional research but in addition dedicate some resources to the partnership.

Their computing power is measured in petaflops - equivalent to a
quadrillion calculations known as floating point operations per second (flops).
Each Tier-0 system in PRACE currently provides at least 1 petaflops of computing
power, though that is expected to be increased to the exaflops level - a
quintillion calculations per second - over the coming years. By comparison, the
human brain is thought by some researchers to be able to process 10 quadrillion
calculations per second (10 petaflops).

'So far the PRACE infrastructure has been used by 36 projects for more than one billion computing core hours,' Dr. Eickermann says. One recently launched project on the PRACE system
is also the biggest yet. Called 'Joint weather and climate high-resolution
global modelling: future weathers and their risks' and led by the National
Centre for Atmospheric Science in the United Kingdom, the project aims to
produce high-resolution, realistic simulations of climatic conditions and
weather patterns. The goal is to increase the fidelity of global climate
simulations and improve understanding of weather and climate risk with a view to
offering much more reliable projections of climate change. It will use 144
million core computing hours on HERMIT, the latest Tier-0 system installed at
the GCS Partner in Stuttgart.

Other new projects will simulate blood flow in the human body, look at the effects of irradiation on nanostructures, study the gravitational effects of black holes in space and help better
understand the solar chromosphere, among many other applications.
'Access to supercomputing resources is an increasingly essential element
to modern science and should help contribute to major breakthroughs in many
fields,' Dr. Eickermann notes.

Prior to PRACE, supercomputing resources were much more fragmented in Europe, with accessibility restricted by country or organisation. Now it is the European scientific community that decides which are
the most promising projects to use precious computing hours - a merit-based
approach that should help maintain or extend European science's competitive edge
in many fields.

'In the United States, supercomputing resources are fragmented between different agencies and bodies, and in Asia they are fragmented between countries. PRACE is therefore offering major advantages to
European research,' says Dr. Eickermann. PRACE-1IP received funding
under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

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