EPICURE: High-Level Support for Research with Top-Flight EuroHPC Systems

Most scientists and engineers who use high-performance computing (HPC) systems to further their research or R&D activities are well aware that the need for advanced levels of support is growing as the top-flight HPC systems approach exascale performance. Tasks that enable users to exploit the full capacity of these systems (or as close to it as possible) are becoming progressively more vital. Some typical examples include adapting code to run on a different HPC system, refactoring code (rewriting or simplifying parts of it) to make it more efficient, and scaling code to make it run on larger numbers of parallel processing components (such as CPUs or GPUs).

Previous articles in the PDC newsletter, such as www.pdc.kth.se/about/publications/pdc-newsletter-2023-no-2/research-software-engineer-teams-organising-the-most-advanced-level-of-user-support-at-the-serc-universities-1.1291981  and www.pdc.kth.se/about/publications/pdc-newsletter-2022-no-2/supporting-research-software-development-1.1208807 , have highlighted the need for top-level user support and establishing a profession for people with the advanced training, experience and subject area expertise to be able to provide these kinds of high-level services. The articles mention various considerations for Sweden in terms of providing advanced user support. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU, eurohpc-ju.europa.eu ), which is responsible for providing a super-/quantum-computing and data infrastructure ecosystem for research in the European Union, also recognises the importance of high-level support for users of their top tier pre-exascale and petascale systems and also for coming exascale systems.

To meet this need, the EUROHPC JU has recently initiated a new project, called EPICURE, to provide top-level support for the researchers who use the EuroHPC top-tier systems. The project is being undertaken by a consortium, led by the CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland, which includes 16 partners from 14 different countries: the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), the Cineca consortium (Italy), the VSB - Technical University of Ostrava (Czechia), the Institute of Information Sciences (Slovenia), LuxProvide (Luxembourg), the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC, Portugal), Sofia Tech Park (Bulgaria), the University of Antwerp (Belgium), the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), the AGH University of Krakow (Poland), the Technical University of Denmark (Denmark), the Jülich Research Centre (Germany), and GENCI (France). There are also two other organisations affiliated with the consortium: the Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia) and CINES (France).

The EPICURE project was launched on the 1st of February 2024 and will establish Application Support Teams (ASTs) based at organisations that host EuroHPC system now or in the future. These teams will work on application porting, optimisation and scalability improvements. In addition, EPICURE will also organise specialised events including training events, workshops, webinars and hackathons. Researchers whose projects are awarded an allocation on one of the EuroHPC systems will be offered access to EPICURE’s support services.

EPICURE will also develop a European HPC Application Support portal that will serve as a single point of contact for researchers using HPC in both the public and private sectors, including small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This portal will provide comprehensive information on EuroHPC systems, their architectures, access mechanisms, and the range of support services available.

KTH’s efforts within EPICURE will be coordinated by PDC. PDC will be involved in all activities of the project with a special focus on code porting, enabling, and scaling, as well as the provision of technical expertise for the optimisation of the cases. For more information about EPICURE, see www.epicure-hpc.eu .