published on Thursday, March 11, 2010

Workshop 'Preparing for the Petascale Computing Challenge' on June 11, 2010

On Friday, June 11, SARA and NCF will organize the workshop 'Preparing for the Petascale Computing Challenge'. The workshop will bring together scientists at the forefront of computational science in the Netherlands, HPC Experts and other stakeholders. Participation is free of cost.

Location
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië 300
2593 CE The Hague

Petascale challenges
Supercomputers with Petascale performance will soon be deployed. These systems will provide unprecedented performance, challenges and opportunities. A large number of scientists in the Netherlands already faces well-defined scientific Petascale challenges, as has been outlined in the publication 'Het belang van High Performance Computing voor Nederland' issued by SARA and NCF in 2009. These challenges require a multidisciplinary approach and a close collaboration between scientists, computational scientists, engineers and technicians.

Objective
The objective of the workshop is to identify the current challenges and issues – including scalability and parallel I/O – on the Huygens and Lisa systems, and to discuss the challenges and issues related to Petascale Computing. The goal of the workshop is to define a common agenda towards Petascale Computing performance in the Netherlands.

Projects and Initiatives
Globally, the topic of Petascale Computing – and also beyond: Exascale Computing – attracts a lot of interest. NCF and SARA are involved in the following projects and upcoming initiatives:

• PRACE (EC FP7), implementation of the pan-European Petascale Computing infrastructure;
• DEISA (EC FP7), the current European infrastructure for Supercomputers, with its groundbreaking DECI (DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative) calls and support;
• EESI, European initiative (which may become an EC FP7 project as well) to align European efforts and research initiatives on software for Petascale and Exascale systems;
• IESP (International Exascale Software Project), which can be viewed as the global variant of EESI, with involvement of the US and Asia (currently Japan).