Project acronym: HPC-Europa
Full title: Pan-European Research Infrastructure on High Performance Computing
Contract number: RII3-CT-2003-506079
Integrated activity
1.
Project objectives and summary
HPC-Europa will provide integrated advanced computational services to the European research community
working at the forefront of science. The ultimate goal is to allow European researchers to maintain a competitive
edge on the world stage. The services delivered will be:
access to HPC platforms for all European researchers,
provision of an advanced computational environment,
technical support and specialist tutoring in the domain of HPC.
The core project is organised around the Transnational Access (TA) activities, and more specifically around the
deployment and operation of a “virtual global infrastructure”.
The Integrated Joint Research Activities (JRA) and Networking Activities (NA) will contribute towards the
previous mentioned main deployment, fulfilling the following main roles:
·
the development and deployment of new high-level services for TA users across the participants;
·
the improvement and integration of existing services available at each single participant site and their
integration and extension;
·
the understanding of users’ requirements;
·
the promotion of best practices amongst the user community.
Tangible deliverables and results of HPC-Europa will be the following:
·
Transnational Access service provision as specified in section 6.TA;
·
Adaptation and integration of a selected toolset into the AccessGrid technology to establish a
collaboration and consultation infrastructure;
·
Realisation of an efficient and portable data management and information retrieval infrastructure for
real-life computational science applications in global networks;
·
Deployment of powerful analysis tools that are uniform across platforms, extend the scalability and
usability of these tools and development joint methodologies for performance analysis;
·
Provision of uniform, flexible and intuitive user access to Grid resources from anywhere, as well as
administration tools for maintaining a Grid environment of the Transnational Access Centre.
The attained results and objectives will be constantly reviewed and this process will ensure that the technical
activities undertaken as part of the NAs and JRAs integrate properly to meet their overall objective and
undertake an assessment of their impact on the user community.
2.
Project website address: http://www.hpc-europa.org
3.
Start date: 1 January 2004
Duration: 48 months
4.
Access modalities
What is HPC-Europa's Transnational Access activity?
The Transnational Access activity enables researchers working in any eligible country in Europe (see list below)
to carry out a collaborative research visit of up to 3 months´ duration in any other eligible country, and to gain
access to some of the most powerful High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities in Europe.
The centres participating in this activity are: BSC (Barcelona), CINECA (Bologna), EPCC (Edinburgh), HLRS
(Stuttgart), IDRIS (Paris) and SARA (Amsterdam).
It is planned that about 800 European researchers can conduct their research activity using the HPC resources of
these centres during the four years life of the project.
HPC-Europa relies on the partners' pre-existing experience of running Transnational Access programmes.
CEPBA-CESCA (BSC) , CINECA and EPCC have in fact all been funded by each of the EC's Transnational
Access programmes since 1993, with the Projects ACCESS, MINOS and TRACS.
Who can benefit from Transnational Access?
Applications are welcome at http://www.hpc-europa.org/ from researchers at any level, from postgraduate
researchers to senior professors, who are working on non-proprietary research in any discipline which can
benefit from High Performance Computing.
All fields of computational sciences are supported by HPC-Europa, including: Theoretical Physics, Condensed
Matter Physics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Astrophysics, Meteo-climatology, Computer
Science, Numerical methods in Engineering, Bio-engineering, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Modelling,
Genomics and Proteomics, Computational Biology and Life sciences, as well as disciplines new to HPC, such as
Cultural Heritage applications and Virtual Archaeology.
Users are expected to publish their results in open literature within a reasonable time.
Visits will be motivated by two factors: potential for scientific collaboration, and the need to use High
Performance Computing facilities. Note that previous experience of HPC is not necessarily a prerequisite.
Applicants should firstly identify a researcher with whom they wish to collaborate, at one of the participating
HPC centres or at a research institute nearby.
For further information about possible "host" departments, see
http://www.hpc-europa.org/index.php?section=Transnational&subsection=host_departments).
Note that applications will be approved primarily on the strength of the potential scientific collaboration.
Applicants must also demonstrate that access to HPC facilities is essential for their research. Any applicant who
cannot make a convincing case for access will not be offered a place on this programme.
Finally, note that researchers may NOT apply to visit a centre in the country in which they normally work.
What does HPC-Europa Transnational Access offer?
* Access to an unrivalled range of supercomputers
Users have access to appropriate HPC systems at the centre visited, and where necessary, access to machines at
other participating centres may be granted.
Consultancy and support is provided by experienced staff.
* Scientific support and collaboration
Visitors work closely with a "host" researcher who works in a similar field at the centre visited or in an near
department.
* Travel and subsistence expenses and accommodation
HPC-Europa pays travel costs - up to a reasonable limit - plus a daily subsistence allowance.
Accommodation may vary between centres and may consist of a single study-bedroom in a self-catering flat,
sharing with other Transnational Access visitors.
*Application
Applications must be made using the on-line form. The programme will last for 4 years and there will be four
Calls for Applications per year. Applications should not be made more than 6 months before the proposed start
date of the visit.
Applications are particularly encouraged from the following categories of researchers:
* those from research groups which have not previously benefited from the programme;
* those whose research would benefit from HPC facilities but who would not normally be able to have access to
these in their own country;
* those working in fields not traditionally associated with HPC.
How long in advance should the researcher apply for a visit?
Selection meetings for HPC-Europa are held every three months.
As a general rule, people should apply between two and six months before they wish to begin their visit. The
selection panel will meet 4-6 weeks after the closing date.
Eligible countries:
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands,
Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden Switzerland, Turkey and the UK.
5.
Achievements
The major achievements in the first year of activity of HPC-Europa can be summarized as follows. A total of
270 applications were made to the Transnational Access programme. The selection panel offered places to 188
user-projects, 97 of which started –- and in most cases were completed - in 2004, with an acceptance rate of
70%. These users spent some 155 visitor-months at the six different infrastructures, and used about 750 000
Allocation Units (AUs). The AU is defined as "the computational power delivered by a computer executing for
one hour at the sustained rate of one GFlops/s".
During the second year of activity of HPC-Europa, a lot of important achievements have been reached. 305
applications were made to the Transnactional Access programme. The selection panel offered places to 222
user-projects, 229 visits started and in most cases were completed in 2005 plus 25 visits completed during 2005,
but started in 2004, with an acceptance rate of 73%.
These users have already spent 356,7 visitor-months to the six different infrastructures and used 2.396.914,06
Allocation Units.
Under the HPC-Europa programme, a number of very successful projects have so far been carried out and a lot
of scientific papers are in preparation and 87 have already been published to referred scientific revues.
After the first year of activity, that may be considered as a start-up and integration period, the different NAs and
JRAs in 2005 efficiently cooperated to create a set of tools and methodologies to support the TA and the
computational sciences community in general. Among the achievements resulting from these actions:
•
Refining and further improvement of the Generic Communication library, designed in 2004, skilful to
send arbitrary data between applications. The library can be integrated in any type of applications that have data
to synchronise in the AccessGrid video conferencing environment;
•
Enhancing of the system for integrating a hierarchical data storage for AccessGrid, to easily allow
inherent data exchange in AccessGrid, useful for many collaborative applications;
•
Building of knowledge and competence in existing and emerging tools and standards for efficient and
portable data management and information retrieval in real-life computational science applications. This
experience involved hands on QCDgrid, comparison between HDF5 and BinX, tests on SRB;
•
Provision of a periodic survey activity, based on a questionnaire submitted to the TA users and to the
scientific hosts, aiming to measure the achievements of the different activities in HPC-Europa and assess their
impact on the user community;
•
Improving of the scalability of the performance tools implemented in 2004, porting of the
instrumentation package to the new HPC platforms installed at the TA sites, and training the users to use the
performance tools to analyse and optimize real applications;
•
Provision of a single point of access portal environment, and useful portlets, for the HPC-Europa users,
suitable to facilitate scientists’ every day work with computationally demanding applications.
Moreover, it is also important to underline that:
•
All the deliverables due during the second year of the project were produced and sent to the
Commission;
•
The contractual targets in terms of number of visitors, access provision and number of visitor months
were close to being reached;
•
The Transnational Access User Meeting organized in Stuttgart was successful both in terms of numbers
of attendees and in terms of the quality of interaction;
•
The Scientific Users Selection Panel goes on representing a possible stable and comprehensive
(transnational, multidisciplinary, intracentre) model for access provision assessment and selection for any
Integrated Infrastructure Initiative, due to its composition - including renowned scientists from many different
fields of the European scientific research community - and its selection methodology.
6.
List of Participants
The following legal entities are Participants to the contract:
Partic.
Role*
Partic.
no.
CO
01
CR
02
CR
03
CR
04
CR
05
CR
06
CR
07
CR
08
CR
09
CR
10
CR
11
*CO = Coordinator
CR = Contractor
Participant name
Consorzio Interuniversitario per la Gestione
del Centro di Calcolo Elettronico dell’Italia
Nord-Orientale
The University of Edinburgh
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Universität Stuttgart
Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique
Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum
Amsterdam
Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej PAN –
Poznańskie Centrum Superkomputerowo
Sieciowe
Universitetet i Bergen
The Provost Fellows and Scholars of the
College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity
of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin
Consorzio Interuniversitario per le
Applicazioni di Supercalcolo per Università
e Ricerca
Institute of Communication and Computer
Systems of the National Technical
University of Athens
Partic.
short name
Country
CINECA
Italy
UEDIN
United
Kingdom
UPC
Spain
USTUTT
Germany
CNRS
France
SARA
Netherlands
PSNC
Poland
UiB
Norway
Department/faculty/institute/
Laboratory
Consorzio Interuniversitario per la Gestione del
Centro di Calcolo Elettronico dell’Italia NordOrientale
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
Centro Europeo de Paralelismo de Barcelona
High Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart
Institut du Développement et des Ressources en
Informatique Scientifique
Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam
Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Centre
High Performance Computing Laboratory
TCD
Ireland
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing
Dublin
CASPUR
Italy
Consorzio Interuniversitario per le Applicazioni
di Supercalcolo per Università e Ricerca
ICCS/
NTUA
Greece
Institute of Communication and Computer
Systems
Laboratory
Short Name
Date enter
project
Date exit
project
CINECA
start of project
end of project
start of project
end of project
CEPBA
start of project
end of project
HLRS
start of project
end of project
IDRIS
start of project
end of project
SARA
start of project
end of project
PSNC
start of project
end of project
EPCC
PARALLAB
start of project
end of project
TCD
start of project
end of project
CASPUR
start of project
end of project
ICCS
start of project
end of project