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PRACE-AISBL
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.
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
benefit from the vast computational capacity they hold. Typically, PRACE allocates resources on given systems at a time following a peer-review process; the main criterion in awarding computational time is the scientific quality of the proposal. “In principle, we do not have defined research priorities, scientific quality is the main consideration. With regular access, it’s just about scientific excellence, and this is not limited to specific disciplines,” stresses Dr Ignatius.
A balance has to be struck here between the long-term scientific agenda and more immediate research priorities that may emerge quite suddenly. While in previous years computational time has been awarded to projects on a diverse range of topics, including neuroscience, engine design and climate change, over the last 18 months or so more and more time has been devoted to analysing COVID-19 as the pandemic has taken hold. “Alongside the regular access we also offer fast-track access, and that’s been used heavily during the coronavirus pandemic,” says Dr Ignatius. The access process was greatly accelerated for coronavirus-related research as the scale of the challenge became apparent, although the high-quality peer review process was still maintained, which Dr Ignatius says required huge amounts of work. “Some key
people really put their heart and soul into it, because it was a common goal with biggestever societal impact,” he says.
High-Performance Computing resources are being
as well as in optimising transport solutions.
Training
The researchers themselves typically have deep expertise in their own field, whether they’re a bioinformatician, physicist, or materials scientist, but they may not necessarily be familiar with HPC resources and the way they work. This is an issue Dr Ignatius and his colleagues in PRACE seek to address. “PRACE organises plenty of training courses, while we are also involved in helping directly in the applications, the numerical software that many users run,” he
says. The technology landscape continually develops and evolves, so Dr Ignatius says it’s also important to prepare effectively and help users adapt to change. “PRACE is involved in HPC market surveillance. We also regularly discuss changes with stakeholders and vendors, and contribute our own technical expertise,” he outlines. “We’re looking at how technology evolves,
and how software adapts to the underlying technological changes.”
This HPC technology is primarily intended for complex projects and technically demanding research, yet some elements could trickle down into more everyday uses in future. Certain technologies associated with supercomputing have entered the mainstream already, on the technical level of the Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), while multi-core processors are also commonly used. “They’re used in PCs and mobile phones, so in that sense, it’s also a step closer to everyday applications. The difficult thing is the communication between these processors however, as in supercomputers they work together,” explains Dr Ignatius. “Energy consumption accounts for around half of the total cost of ownership of a supercomputer over its operational lifetime, so it’s important to try and decrease it, to be more environmentally friendly.”
The development of neuromorphic computing, which seeks to mimic how the human brain functions, could help dramatically reduce energy consumption while still maintaining vast computational capacity. Another major area of interest in research is quantum computing, where the holy grail would be a so-called general purpose quantum computer, although this is a distant prospect at this stage. “That is still quite far away. At the moment, quantum computation is still limited to very specific applications. However, we expect that more hybrid computers will emerge in the latter half of this decade,” continues Dr Ignatius. As the Chair of the PRACE Council, Dr Ignatius is involved in monitoring these developments and helping HPC user communities prepare and adapt. “One of the strengths of PRACE is that it is a trusted neutral actor. It’s agnostic to different developments, or commercial vendors,” he outlines.
Supporting science
The wider aim here for PRACE is to support scientific research through providing access to HPC resources to those who could use them. This includes scientists from a wide variety of disciplines, as outlined in The Scientific Case for Computing in Europe 2018-2026, a report written by the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee. “This report lists the grand challenges in different scientific domains,” says Dr Ignatius. HPC resources have an important role to play in this respect, enabling researchers to simulate the formation of the galaxies and improve the resolution of weather forecasting for example, as well as bringing the prospect of personalised medicine a step closer. “The raison d’etre of PRACE is to aid scientific discovery. This includes addressing subjects that are relevant for society at large, across many different disciplines,” says Dr Ignatius.
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe Project Objectives
PRACE enables high-impact scientific discovery and engineering research and development across all disciplines to enhance European competitiveness for the benefit of society, by offering world class computing and data management resources and services through a peer review process. The PRACE-6IP project supports PRACE and the HPC ecosystem by building on the core principles of support, co-ordination, and collaboration.
Project Funding
PRACE aisbl is funded by the PRACE Members. The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020).
Project Partners
• https://prace-ri.eu/about/ip-projects/
Contact Details
Chair of PRACE Council, Dr. Janne Ignatius PRACE aisbl Rue du Trône 98, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium E: janne.ignatius@csc.fi W: https://prace-ri.eu/
https://prace-ri.eu/news-media/publications/ prace-fact-sheets/ https://www.youtube.com/user/PRACERI
Dr. Janne Ignatius
Dr. Janne Ignatius is Director responsible for Computing Research Infrastructures at CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland. He holds an Adjunct Professorship of Theoretical Physics at University of Helsinki. In PRACE Dr. Ignatius has served in confidential posts for over a decade, chairing PRACE Council since 2020.
