PRACE-2IP: PRACE Second Implementation Phase Project

The purpose of the PRACE Research Infrastructure is to provide a sustainable high-quality infrastructure for Europe that can meet the most demanding needs of European HPC user communities through the provision of user access to the most powerful HPC systems available worldwide at any given time. In tandem with access to Tier-0 systems, the PRACE project will foster the coordination between national HPC resources (Tier-1 systems) to best meet the needs of the European HPC user community.

To ensure that European scientific and engineering communities have access to leading edge supercomputers in the future, the PRACE-2IP project evaluates novel architectures, technologies, systems, and software. Optimizing and scaling of applications for Tier-0 and Tier-1 systems is a core service of PRACE.

PRACE-2IP is organised in twelve interrelated Work Packages that produce the project results in parallel. To structure the work they are grouped in four pillars: Tier-1 integration, Technology & Industry, Applications and Training and Dissemination. Actions directly visible to the users of PRACE include regular training events, scientific conferences and publishing a PRACE magazine focusing on the results from Tier-0 and Tier-1 projects. A special focus will be on the establishment of PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATC) in Europe.

With its expertise from previous PRACE projects, LRZ lead WP11 “Prototyping” and the Technology & Industry Pillar, and contributed to WP2 “Framework for Resource Interchange”, WP6 “European HPC Infrastructure Operation and Evolution“, WP7 “Scaling Applications for Tier-0 and Tier-1 Users”, and WP10 “Advancing the Operational Infrastructure” in PRACE 2IP. 

Highlights

During the final project review of the PRACE 2IP project the European Commision attested ‘excellent’ work to WP11.

Publications

Torsten Wilde, Axel Auweter, Michael K. Patterson, Hayk Shoukourian, Herbert Huber, Arndt Bode,Detlef Labrenz, Carlo Cavazzoni: DWPE, A New Data Center Energy-Efficiency Metric Bridging the Gap Between Infrastructure and Workload; In Proceedings of 2014 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2014), July 2014, p.893 – 901; ISBN: 978-1-4799-5311-0

Hayk Shoukourian, Torsten Wilde, Axel Auweter, Arndt Bode: Monitoring Power Data: A first step towards a unified energy efficiency evaluation toolset for HPC data centers; in Elsevier Environmental Modelling & Software (Thematic issue on Modelling and evaluating the sustainability of smart solutions), Volume 56, June 2014, Pages 13–26; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2013.11.011

Anastopoulos N., Nikunen P., Weinberg V. (Ed.), Best Practice Guide – SuperMUC, May 2013, http://www.prace-ri.eu/IMG/pdf/Best-Practice-Guide-SuperMUC.pdf.

Eide V., Lioen W., Szpindler M., Weinberg V., Petascaling and Optimisation for Tier-1 Architectures, May 2013, http://www.prace-ri.eu/IMG/pdf/d7.3.pdf.

Scott B. D., Weinberg V., Hoenen O., Karmakar A., Fazendeiro L., Scalability of the plasma physics code GEM, PRACE Whitepaper, Dec 2013, http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1187

Weinberg V., Karmakar A., Towards Simulating Plasma Turbulences in Future Large-Scale Tokamaks. In: Inside, Innovatives Supercomputing in Deutschland, Vol. 12, No. 1, Juni 2014

Fast Facts