Next Phase: PRACE-6IP

We are glad to announce that PRACE is moving on and has just submitted the project application for the PRACE 6th Implementation Phase (which would be known as PRACE-6IP) to the European Commission under the H2020 calls. The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) with three Swedish high performance computing (HPC) centres – namely PDC, the National Supercomputing Centre (NSC) at Linköping University, and the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) at Umeå University – will continue to be one of the 25 PRACE partners.

In general, the activities within PRACE-6IP will not differ much from the activities that are being carried out now within 5IP. However, there two major changes.

1. The DECI optional program will be reorganized and merged even more closely within PRACE. This change will not affect PRACE users/researchers as such but is more of an internal reorganization process.
2. A new work package within PRACE-6IP will be dedicated to so-called “Forward-looking Software Solutions Projects”, where ten software projects will be selected to be worked on. The aim of this is to deliver forward-looking software solutions (to PRACE Tier- 0 users and research communities) for the two main challenges induced by the rapidly changing HPC pre-exascale landscape, namely the diversity of hardware (requiring performance portability in codes), and software complexity (requiring separation of concerns in codes).

We expect to get the decision from the European Commission about the PRACE-6IP application during the autumn of 2018. The PRACE research infrastructure is also working intensively to adapt to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules in relation to users’ data. In our next newsletter, we hope to inform you about the changes that will have been adopted and put into place for PRACE within the GDPR rules.