Editorial

Collaboration with industry is an important aspect of PDC to facilitate technology transfer from academia to industry and foster the uptake of high-performance computing (HPC) in industrial settings. A highlight of these collaborations is our engagement with Scania, which has developed into a very close collaboration over several years. This summer Scania invested heavily in our flagship system, Beskow, and, thanks to this investment, Beskow has been upgraded to a total capacity of 2.5 petaflops. You can read more about Scania's HPC usage and the Beskow upgrade in our cover story. Also mark your calendars for the upcoming PDC Industry Day on the 1st of March 2018.

The main focus of PDC is clearly to support academic HPC users. Although we do provide Swedish researchers with excellent hardware resources, some have even greater needs that cannot be met nationally. This is why we are a member of PRACE: to provide Swedish scientists with the possibility to access the largest European HPC systems. Four large-scale Swedish PRACE applications have been granted lately, as well as a number of smaller DECI and industrial allocations.

During the autumn we have continued our education programme, with the PDC summer school being a particular highlight, and the CodeRefinery project has had their first set of workshops. Together with the Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC) we have started a new initiative – the PDC-SeRC seminar series; these seminars highlight innovative research using HPC. The BioExcel project has recently organized their first Community Forum, and we are also hosting our first visitors at PDC through the HPCE3 programme.

When PDC retires computer systems, their components are typically recycled. But sometimes these systems also see a new life at another place. This summer we were able to donate parts of our old “Ekman” system to the University of Sarajevo, supporting their efforts in educating the next generation of computational researchers.

Finally, the implementation of SNIC 2.0, the next phase of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), is making good progress. With the approval of the next round of funding by the Swedish Research Council (VR), a major milestone has been met and now the SNIC universities are finalizing their collaboration within SNIC 2.0. This means that for the next couple of years the continued operation of SNIC is guaranteed and Swedish researchers will continue to have access to leading HPC systems for their work. With this good news, I would like to wish all PDC users "God Jul & Gott Nytt År"!

Erwin Laure, Director PDC