High-performance computing for major societal challenges High-performance computing resources are an important tool in many areas of science, enabling researchers to simulate different scenarios in unprecedented detail and gain deeper insights. The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) provides researchers with access to HPC resources, helping them address societally relevant questions, as Dr Janne Ignatius explains. Researchers across a
number of scientific disciplines use high-performance computing (HPC) resources to analyse data, perform simulations and gain deeper insights into key questions, including specialists in areas like computational physics, chemistry and meteorology. Alongside these disciplines, HPC resources are being used across a widening range of scientific domains. “For example, HPC resources are an important tool in the biomedical sciences. They are also being applied in the humanities, linguistic studies, and economics, as well as in optimising transport solutions,” says Dr Janne Ignatius, Chair of the PRACE Council, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. A notfor-profit association based in Brussels, PRACE was established with the aim of enabling more researchers to use HPC resources. “We aim to not only provide access to resources, but to essentially spread the expertise and the ability to use them,” explains Dr Ignatius.
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Applications The focus here is on the top-tier supercomputers with very high levels of computing power, including some petaflop machines, as well as a number of national centres. There are 26 member countries within the PRACE programme, which provides access to HPC resources to researchers from both academia and industry, helping them address questions around major societal challenges. “This includes topics like energy sustainability, materials development and bioscience,” outlines Dr Ignatius. Climate change is another very important area in which HPC resources can be applied, says Dr Ignatius. “Analysing the long-term evolution of the climate system on Earth, coupling oceans to the atmosphere, and predicting hurricanes, are all very important for example,” he stresses. “There is also the potential for major societal impact through the advancement of industrial manufacturing, as well as some engineering applications.”
An increasing number of HPC resources are now available in Europe to meet this demand, following the establishment of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which is working closely with PRACE. The first EuroHPC petascale systems, capable of performing more than 1015 floating point operations a second, are now coming online, and Dr Ignatius says further progress is expected in the near future. “So-called preexascale systems (close to 1018 operations a second), will probably come towards the end of this year. There is also a roadmap towards even bigger systems in future,” he outlines. This will lead to wider benefits for European scientists, believes Dr Ignatius. “The amount of supercomputing resources in Europe is now clearly growing with the establishment of EuroHPC JU. This is very good news for science in Europe, and for the scientists using HPC,” he says. The aim then is to award access to HPC resources to those researchers who could
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