The Transnational Access research visit programme is the central activity in HPC-Europa2.
The associated Networking Activities and Joint Research Activities are developing extra tools and services to enhance the visitor programme and to consolidate HPC-Europa2’s role as a virtual supercomputing meta-centre providing services for Europe’s scientific communities.
Networking Activities
Facilitating the HPC Ecosystem
HPC-Europa2 aims to establish a solid and effective HPC ecosystem at European level, integrating and extending the methodologies developed by HPC-Europa2 to the wider European HPC community through co-operation with external agencies and projects such as DEISA and PRACE.
Training, Consultancy and Communication of the HPC Culture
The goals of this project are to improve the support, consultancy and training activities for HPC-Europa2 users, helping to make our HPC facilities accessible to newcomers in the field as well as experienced users. This project is also developing support for collaborative meeting tools based on existing infrastructures.
Joint Research Activities
HPC on Massively Parallel Architectures: Programming models
With the newest HPC infrastructures offering computing power in the order of several hundred TeraFlop/s and even PetaFlop/s, challenges arise in terms of adapting scientific applications for optimal exploitation of these systems. In general, this means adopting new programming models and (re)writing or even re-engineering code. This project addresses these challenges by testing and analysing innovative solutions for parallel computing on massively parallel architectures.
Virtual Cluster
This project is developing an “HPC-Europa2 Live CD” which will allow hands-on building of a “virtual cluster” to provide HPC-Europa2 visitors with some experience of parallel machines and methodologies before their visit. The CD will create an ad-hoc cluster incorporating all the tools and training material developed by each HPC-Europa2 partner site. This should help the visitor to prepare their code for use on the target HPC machine at an early stage of their visit.
The ISO image of the Virtual Cluster Live DVD is now available to download from the HPC-Europa2 consortium webpage.
Tools for Scientific Data Services
This project is developing data-grid tools with flexible and powerful meta-data capabilities to address the growing size and complexity of the results of calculations produced by current HPC systems. In particular, it is developing innovative solutions for scientific data management, search and filtering, and tools for high-level data-analysis to investigate and describe complex data-relationships. These tools will improve data accessibility and reusability and will enable exchange within international research communities, thus greatly improving the efficiency with which research communities operate on data.
For further information about any of these projects, please visit the HPC-Europa2 consortium’s central webpage