Editorial

2019 has started big for high performance computing (HPC) in Europe! The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has become fully functional and is preparing for the first major investments — at least two pre-exascale systems and several petascale systems. We discuss more about the EuroHPC plans and Sweden’s involvement in these developments in this newsletter. In addition, the existing European ecosystem within PRACE is developing, with a new implementation project (PRACE-6IP) starting and a new edition of the scientific case being published. I sincerely recommend reading this scientific case that includes a wealth of information on what great research is being performed using our HPC resources.

Another part of the European HPC ecosystem is HPC-Europa3 — their Transnational Access exchange programme has enabled many European researchers to visit their colleagues in other countries and use the local HPC resources for their work. As part of this programme, many researchers have visited Sweden and used our HPC resources. If you would be interested in taking advantage of the opportunities offered by this programme — either in terms of travelling elsewhere yourself or hosting a fellow colleague — get in touch with us.

The future organization of e-infrastructures is also a big topic in Sweden. The Swedish Research Council (VR) has just published a new study on “An outlook for the national roadmap for research e-infrastructures” that analyses the current status of Swedish e-infrastructures and gives recommendations for their further evolution. I am sure this report, as well as its findings and recommendations, will be subject to many discussions in the coming months.

With our current main system, Beskow, PDC is an important part of the Swedish e-infrastructure and, although the lifetime of the system has been extended until the end of 2020, preparations for the next system at PDC are already well underway. This includes working with the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) to ensure the availability of an adequate budget, considering market and technology studies, and most importantly understanding the future needs of researchers using our systems. To assist with the latter, we organized an “extreme usage workshop” with the main user groups in January, which helped us to better understand their requirements and potential future usage models. If you have input or considerations on the design of PDC’s future system — drop by or send us a note!

Training and education is a cornerstone of our activities and, with the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have partnered with PRACE to organize one of the first Deep Learning workshops within SNIC. Further activities along these lines will follow in the autumn and we are already preparing for our flagship event, the PDC Summer School, towards the end of August.

Finally, I would like to point you again to our blog ( www.kth.se/blogs/pdc ) where a lot of interesting HPC topics are being discussed. With this newsletter, we are making a start on publishing some of these interesting blog articles in our newsletter format too (for those of you who have not yet checked the online blog site). We hope that our blog and newsletter provide you with some interesting reading over the summer!

Erwin Laure, Director PDC