EASC2016 in Stockholm

The 4th International Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC2016) was held in Stockholm from the 25th to the 29th of April 2016. The conference was organized by PDC with support from the Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC), the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication, Cray, NVIDIA and the EPIGRAM project. Over 80 attendees gathered to discuss application and software challenges in the upcoming Exascale era.

The program featured 37 contributed presentations, selected by an international programme committee, as well as four keynote presentations by high-profile international experts. Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology discussed what impact the foreseeable end of Moore’s law will have and concluded that we are about to change from a FLOPS-oriented to a bytes- oriented regime. Karlheinz Meier from Heidelberg University gave a different perspective on computing, discussing brain-inspired neuromorphic approaches. John Shalf from the Laurence Berkley National Laboratory gave a sneak preview of the Exascale era and the programming systems that we will be using in the future. Finally, Erland Källén from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts explained how Exascale systems can help producing ever more detailed and precise weather forecasts.

The conference also featured a dedicated session about the recently started High Performance Computing Centres of Excellence (CoE), as well as a workshop on European Exascale projects. A panel discussion explored what role CoEs and other European Exascale efforts will have and what efforts are going to be needed to smooth the transition from Peta- to Exascale.

Videos of the keynote presentations, as well as slides from many of the other presentations, are available at the conference website: www.easc2016.com  and on EPiGRAM’s YouTube channel at goo.gl/VfNiNu .

In 2017, EASC will be back to Edinburgh, where this successful conference series started.