First PDC Industry Day Great Success

On the 1st of March 2018 PDC organized an event for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large companies that have an interest in high performance computing (HPC). The intention with the event was for the participants to discuss the use of HPC by non-academic researchers, as well as their HPC requirements, and to introduce recent HPC developments and collaborative research possibilities (both on the national and international levels) that enable industrial concerns to work with academic HPC systems, in addition to showcasing successful examples of such research.

Over 30 people attended the event – coming from 13 different enterprises and organizations, such as PDC’s strategic partner Scania, as well as Westinghouse Electric Sweden, Sandvik Coromant, the ESI Group and Arm, along with several SMEs including Airinnova, Creo Dynamics, Adaptive Simulations and FS Dynamics.

There were many stimulating talks and plenty of interesting questions were brought to the table. Various companies demonstrated impressive results that were produced thanks to the use of HPC. Airinnova and Creo Dynamics are two of the Swedish SMEs that have been using HPC systems under the auspices of the international projects PRACE and HPCEuropa3. Both of those companies highlighted the importance of having opportunities to access HPC systems - free of charge. This is especially valuable for SMEs as smaller companies rarely have the resources to provide their own HPC systems.

Scania AB, being a strategic partner to PDC, walked people through the whole collaboration process and also displayed some research results that were recently obtained on one of the PDC HPC systems called Beskow. Westinghouse and Sandvik Coromant presented interesting results obtained using their own computational clusters and discussed their future HPC plans, along with discussing their needs to adopt even more extensive use of HPC. Overall the participants evaluated the event as having been quite successful and noted particularly that it had been a useful forum for sharing information between the different enterprises about their HPC requirements and how they use HPC.