published on Wednesday, February 25, 2009

HPC Infrastructures for Petascale Applications - DEISA PRACE Symposium 2009

DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, and PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, are - for the first time - merging their annual science symposia into one big European HPC event: The DEISA PRACE Symposium 2009. This symposium will take place from May 11 to May 13 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and will be hosted by SARA and NCF at the Royal Tropical Institute.

The theme of this unique symposium is “HPC Infrastructures for Petascale Applications”. This is what PRACE and DEISA are jointly creating for Europe - and what other organisations and projects are building in the USA and Asia. The symposium is of major interest to a broad audience: from scientific users, HPC technology experts and vendors, government representatives and industry partners.

Prominent keynote speakers from all over the world are going to outline the global perspectives of High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Petascale era, the new generation of supercomputers for scientific research. Speakers on the first day include Mario Campolargo of the European Commission; Ed Seidel from the National Science Foundation (USA) and Ryutaro Himeno from RIKEN (Japan).

The second day continues on HPC global perspectives with further talks from the European Commission, USA, Australia, India. The session “Science Communities” will feature the following speakers: Sylvie Joussaume (climate research), Carlos Frenk (cosmology), Frank Jenko (fusion research) and Peter Coveney (life sciences). PRACE is going to reveal its perspectives on HPC architectures, Applications, Training and Education, The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative will present ten computational science grand challenge projects from all over Europe and covering many science areas.

Registration for the DEISA PRACE Symposium is open at DEISA's and PRACE's websites (more information below). Registration is free of charge.

More information
For more information please visit the DEISA and PRACE websites www.deisa.eu, and www.prace-project.eu.

See also the Symposium webpage on the PRACE website.


About DEISA
In EU FP7, the DEISA Consortium continues to support and further develop the distributed high performance computing infrastructure and its services through the DEISA2 project funded for three more years as of May 2008. Activities and services relevant for Applications Enabling, Operation, and Technologies are continued and further enhanced, as these are indispensable for the effective support of computational sciences in the HPC area.

About PRACE
The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) prepares the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, consisting of several tier-0 centres providing European researchers with access to capability computers and forming the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. The PRACE project receives funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-211528.

About SARA and NCF
SARA Computing and Networking Services (www.sara.nl) is the Dutch National Supercomputing and e-science support center and offers a complete package of advanced ICT services including high performance computing & visualization, high performance networking, grid and other e-Science services. SARA is one of the major European ICT supernodes and partner in DEISA and PRACE.
NCF (www.nwo.nl/ncf) is an independent foundation under the umbrella of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). NCF is responsible for the high-end computing infrastructure for science and public research in the Netherlands and is one of PRACE principle partners.