Editorial

The Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC) has had a tremendous impact on computational research in Sweden and many of PDC’s users are SeRC researchers. PDC, together with the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC), constitute the SeRC core computational infrastructure. In this newsletter we discuss some of SeRC’s key successes and present some of the strategic areas that SeRC will address in the future. One of these is a Scientific Computing Lab that will be established at PDC over summer - this will help researchers who use PDC’s resources in their collaborations with PDC’s application experts.

PDC has been busy organizing events in recent months. Before Christmas we held the first Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) all-hands meeting where the SNIC employees met to discuss improving SNIC's services. April found us running the 4th Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC) – a high-profile international event where the challenges associated with exascale computing are discussed. The traditional PDC pub in May provided an informal setting for users and PDC staff to meet, and earlier on in January we had hosted a workshop in collaboration with Allinea that focused on their performance and debugging tools. More recently the BioExcel project started a sequence of webinars, targeting biomolecular researchers. Nostalgic sentiments were stirred in March when we participated in a seminar looking back at the Virtual Reality Cube that PDC operated between 1998 and 2008.

There is also quite a lot of news on the international front as PRACE is introducing new types of preparatory access mechanisms, as well as a code vault. PDC is also active in two PRACE industrial SHAPE projects and we are delighted that quite a few Swedish researchers have been granted additional computing time through the DECI Tier-1 access.

This spring the Swedish Research Council (VR) started a process with the Swedish universities to discuss the future long-term financing of SNIC, a process that will extend well beyond summer. Another more local process that will keep us busy over the summer is the establishment of the SeRC Scientific Computing Lab (which is mentioned in the SeRC article in this newsletter). During the summer we will be re-building parts of PDC to create an open interaction space where PDC experts and users can collaborate. You will find more about both of these activities in the next edition of our newsletter.

But, for now, I wish you a relaxing summer and I'm looking forward to all the great research that will be done on PDC's systems in autumn.

Erwin Laure – Director PDC, and CST