FocusCoE at EuroHPC Summit Week 2022
With the support of the FocusCoE project, almost all European HPC Centres of Excellence (CoEs) participated once again in the EuroHPC Summit Week (EHPCSW) this year in Paris, France: the first EHPCSW in person since 2019’s event in Poland. Hosted by the French HPC agency Grand équipement national de calcul intensif (GENCI), the conference was organised by Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), the European Technology Platform for High-Performance Computing (ETP4HPC), The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), and the European Commission (EC).As usual, this year’s event gathered the main European HPC stakeholders from technology suppliers and HPC infrastructures to scientific and industrial HPC users in Europe.
At the workshop on the European HPC ecosystem on Tuesday 22 March at 14:45, where the diversity of the ecosystem was presented around the Infrastructure, Applications, and Technology pillars, project coordinator Dr. Guy Lonsdale from Scapos talked about FocusCoE and the CoEs’ common goal.
Later that day from 16:30 until 18:00h, the FocusCoE project hosted a session titled “European HPC CoEs: perspectives for a healthy HPC application eco-system and Exascale” involving most of the EU CoEs. The session discussed the key role of CoEs in the EuroHPC application pillar, focussing on their impact for building a vibrant, healthy HPC application eco-system and on perspectives for Exascale applications. As described by Dr. Andreas Wierse on behalf of EXCELLERAT, “The development is continuous. To prepare companies to make good use of this technology, it’s important to start early. Our task is to ensure continuity from using small systems up to the Exascale, regardless of whether the user comes from a big company or from an SME”.
Keen interest in the agenda was also demonstrated by attendees from HPC related academia and industry filling the hall to standing room only. In light of the call for new EU HPC Centres of Excellence and the increasing return to in-person events like EHPCSW, the high interest in preparing the EU for Exascale has a bright future.
FocusCoE Hosts Intel OneAPI Workshop for the EU HPC CoEs
On March 2, 2022 FocusCoE hosted Intel for a workshop introducing the oneAPI development environment. In all, over 40 researchers representing the EU HPC Centres of Excellence (CoEs)were able to attend the single day workshop to gain an overview of OneAPI. The 8 presenters from Intel gave presentations through the day covering the OneAPI vision, design, toolkits, a use case with GROMACS (which is already used by some of the EU HPC CoEs), and specific tools for migration and debugging.
Launched in 2019, the Intel OneAPI cross-industry, open, standards-based unified programming model is being designed to deliver a common developer experience across accelerator architectures. With the time saved designing for specific accelerators, OneAPI is intended to enable faster application performance, more productivity, and greater innovation. As summarized on Intel’s OneAPI website, “Apply your skills to the next innovation, and not to rewriting software for the next hardware platform.” Given the work that EU HPC CoEs are currently doing to optimise codes for Exascale HPC systems, any tools that make this process faster and more efficient can only boost CoEs capacity for innovation and preparedness for future heterogeneous systems.
The OneAPI industry initiative is also encouraging collaboration on the oneAPI specification and compatible oneAPI implementations. To that end, Intel is investing time and expertise into events like this workshop to give researchers the knowledge they need not only to use but help improve OneAPI. The presenters then also make themselves available after the workshop to answer questions from attendees on an ongoing basis. Throughout our event, participants were continuously able to ask questions and get real-time answers as well as offers for further support from software architects, technical consulting engineers, and the researcher who presented a use case. Lastly, the full video and slides from presentations are available below for any CoEs who were unable to attend or would like a second look at the detailed presentations.
CoEs at Teratec Forum 2021 and ISC21
With the support of FocusCoE, a number of HPC CoEs will give short presentations at the virtual PRACE booth in the following two HPC-related events: Teratec Forum 2021 and ISC2021 that will take place towards the end of this month. See the schedule below for more details. Please reserve the slots in your calendars, registration details will be provided on the PRACE website soon!
“We are happy to see that FocusCoE was able to help the HPC CoEs to have a significant presence at this year’s editions of ISC and Teratec Forum, two major HPC events, enabled through our good synergies with PRACE”, says Guy Lonsdale, FocusCoE coordinator.
Teratec Forum 2021 schedule
Date / Event | Time slot CEST | Title | Speaker | Organisation |
Tue 22 June | 11:00 – 11:15 | EoCoE-II: Towards exascale for Energy | Edouard Audit, EoCoE-II coordinator | CEA (France) |
| 14:30 – 14:45 | POP CoE: Free Performance Assessments for the HPC Community | Bernd Mohr | Jülich Supercomputing Centre |
Thu 24 June | 13:45 – 14:00 | EXCELLERAT – paving the way for the evolution towards Exascale | Amgad Dessoky / Sophia Honisch | HLRS |
ISC 2021 schedule
Date / Event | Time slot CEST | Title | Speaker | Organisation |
Thu 24 June | 13:45 – 14:00 | EXCELLERAT – paving the way for the evolution towards Exascale | Amgad Dessoky / Sophia Honisch | HLRS |
Fri 25 June | 11:00 – 11:15 | The Center of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth (ChEESE) | Alice-Agnes Gabriel | Geophysik, University of Munich |
| 15:30 – 15:45 | EoCoE-II: Towards exascale for Energy | Edouard Audit, EoCoE-II coordinator | CEA (France) |
Tue 29 June | 11:00 – 11:15 | Towards a maximum utilization of synergies of HPC Competences in Europe | Bastian Koller, HLRS | HLRS |
Wed 30 June | 10:45 -11:00 | CoE | Dr.-Ing. Andreas Lintermann | Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH |
Thu 1 July | 11:00 -11:15 | POP CoE: Free Performance Assessments for the HPC Community | Bernd Mohr | Jülich Supercomputing Centre |
| 14:30 -14:45 | TREX: an innovative view of HPC usage applied to Quantum Monte Carlo simulations | Anthony Scemama (1), William Jalby (2), Cedric Valensi (2), Pablo de Oliveira Castro (2) | (1) Laboratoire de Chimie et Physique Quantiques, CNRS-Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France (2) Université de Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Université Paris Saclay, France |
Please register to the short presentations through the PRACE event pages here:
| PRACE Virtual booth at Teratec Forum 2021 | PRACE Virtual booth at ISC2021 |
| prace-ri.eu/event/teratec-forum-2021/ | prace-ri.eu/event/praceisc-2021/ |
TREX Project – Interview with Anthony Scemama, CNRS
Postdoc/software engineer positions within TREX
TREX, the newly funded European Center of Excellence in the field of quantum chemistry has open positions for postdocs and a software engineer at several of the project partners institutions.
ETP4HPC handbook 2020 released
The 2020 edition of the ETP4HPC Handbook of HPC projects is available. It offers a comprehensive overview over the European HPC landscape that currently consists of around 50 active projects and initiatives. Amongst these are the 14 Centres of Excellence and FocusCoE, that are also represented in this edition of the handbook.
Press Release: New CoE TREX to push research in quantum chemistry simulations a step further
Recently launched under the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, TREX is the new HPC Centre of Excellence for quantum chemistry.
It tackles the great challenge of enhancing the tools available for the chemistry community to understand the fundamental properties of the matter.
