HPCS 2012 keynotes: Tuesday keynote: Europe back in the HPC race: Building a European ecosystem to recover and maintain the capacity of designing and building large computers
Jean Gonnord, Felix Schürmann, James C. Sexton, Jesús Labarta · 2012
High Power Computing is unanimously recognized today as strategic for research, industry, society and defence. After a long absence, Europe has set up in 2008, as part of PCRD7, the PRACE project to give European research world class computing access. CEA, which has always been a major actor in this field, has a more global vision covering from the multiple usage of HPC to the development of the necessary technology. To support its strategy, CEA established a scientific computing complex, one of the largest in the world with two pétaflop/s machines, set up a research platform on machine architectures, parallelism, and software environment shared with industrial and academic partners, and shows an ambitious roadmap to the exaflop/s. The last result of CEA strategy is the BULL TERA100 machine, the first pétaflop/s computer ever designed and built in Europe. The TERA100 machine, followed by the Curie machine of the PRACE project, the HELIOS machine of the Fusion program, and a lot of industrial success are demonstrating the capability of Europe to come back on this challenging market. With this background the European Commission has called in 2012, as part of its HORIZON 2020 program, for an ambitious project: • Provide a world-class European HPC infrastructure, benefitting a broad range of academic and industry users, and especially SMEs, including a workforce well trained in HPC; • Ensure independent access to HPC technologies, systems and services for the EU. The talk will cover what has been done in Europe in this period and what is in preparation to answer the European Commission roadmap.