Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe - Prace

Supercomputers are indispensable tools for solving the most challenging and complex scientific and technological problems through simulations. To remain internationally competitive, European scientists and engineers must be provided access to leadership class supercomputer systems. PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, aims to create a pan-European high performance computing (HPC) service. This infrastructure will be managed as a single European entity.

The objectives of PRACE are to:

Create and implement by 2009-2010, a persistent, sustainable pan-European HPC service with three to five HPC leadership systems of Petaflop/s performance.

Define and establish a legal and organizational structure involving HPC centers, national funding agencies, and scientific user communities.

Prepare for the deployment of Petaflop/s systems in 2009/2010 under the responsibility of European supercomputing centres having the expertise, competence, and required infrastructure to provide a comprehensive service to user groups. From industry and academia.

Collect requirements and demands from the user community about future applications.
The PRACE infrastructure will be complemented with network and grid access, and the services required to enable applications. These include development of parallel application software expertise, packages, and data handling. PRACE will build on the partners’ experience and use concepts and services from EC-funded projects such as GÉANT2 and DEISA.
The partnership will collaborate with the European IT-industry to influence the development of emerging technologies and components for promising Petaflop/s architectures that will reach the market after 2010.
The pan-European HPC service will be a part of the European Research Area.

CSCS involvement in PRACE

CSCS is a General Partner in the PRACE project. It participates in all non-administrative work packages and is leads one of them (for distributed systems management ).
For more details on PRACE, please refer to the PRACE website .