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Access to International High Performance Computing – A PRACE User Perspective

Professor Aake Nordlund, Niels Bohr Instituttet, KU

Abstract:
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) offers access to Tier-0 resources – the largest supercomputers in Europe (e.g. JUQEEN at Jülich, CURIE in Paris, FERMI at Cineca, and MareNostrum in Barcelona) based on a fair and very well functioning peer-review process. In addition, PRACE/DECI offers access to Tier-1 resources – medium size supercomputers similar to SNIC at KTH in Sweden.

Calls are typically issued twice a year, with additional rolling calls for ‘preparatory access’, for developing and scaling test purposes. These are valuable resources, available to researchers at Danish institutions through the Danish membership of the PRACE organization. The special conditions that are attached to PRACE grant, in particular the fact that grants are generally limited to one year of access, and the requirement that all results must be unloaded within 60 days after that, makes it important to have sufficient local resources to cope with the large amounts of data typically generated by the projects. This includes both access to local analysis machines, with advanced graphics software and hardware, large amounts of shared memory and disks with large I/O bandwidth, as well as access to (possibly national) data storage facilities where results both can be kept secure, and can be shared with peers around the world.

Revideret
22 dec 2015