(Cross posting from ETH Life)

The Swiss platform for High-Performance and High-Productivity Computing (HP2C) is the world’s first and only project with the aim of developing optimized scientific simulations for high-performance computers. Seismologists from ETH Zurich are also involved, namely in the «Petaquake» project.

What is the exact structure of the Earth’s interior? What are the processes that take place there? Where and how do earthquakes originate? These are some of the central questions concerning our planet that we have not yet been able to answer with certainty. A view into the Earth’s interior similar to computed tomography for a human being could provide these answers, thus helping to improve seismic risk maps. This would be an important basis for assessing the risk of the locations of nuclear power plants or hospitals in Switzerland for example.

Rread the full article on ETH Life »

Thomas Eickermann of Jülich Supercomputing Centre welcoming the participants to the kick-off:

Switzerland is being represented in PRACE by CSCS who is contributing to the following working packages:

• WP2 Evolution of the Research Infrastructure
• WP3 Dissemination and Training
• WP8 Support for the procurement and commissioning of HPC services
• WP9 Future Technologies

The main objective of the PRACE-RI is to provide Computational Scientists and Engineers with a leading edge supercomputing infrastructure and corresponding world-class support for its most effective use. This infrastructure will guarantee European researchers access to the best facilities in a highly competitive world. Furthermore, it will give Europe the autonomy and independence to decide on suitable directions to address the many social issues we face worldwide today based on our own verifiable research from our own e-infrastructures. It complements the permanent PRACE Research Infrastructure, which is established and maintained through national funding for the supercomputer hardware and the hosting facilities they require. The proposed activity is essential for maintaining the state-of-the-art in all aspects of a cross-operational nature: from coordinated system selection and design, coherent management of the distributed infrastructure, software deployment, porting, scaling, optimising applications and promoting and advancing application development and the skills required to do so. This project will be fully in line with the objectives of the PRACE RI organisation and will specifically address those matters that are directly relevant to the Research Infrastructure, its future directions, its use and its users.

It foresees the speedy cost-effective and optimal utilisation of the PRACE RI and in the future, through its continual renewal, to maintain world-wide leadership. It builds upon the results of the PRACE Preparatory Phase project and intensifies as well as expands the Networking and Service Activities targeting the users and their communities. It will integrate many aspects of the DEISA project, in particular the organisation of Tier-1 access (i.e. focuses on the continuation of a permanent process to evaluate promising technologies for future multi-Petaflop/s to Exaflop/s technologies and also engagement in collaborations to develop new technologies with industrial partners.

For an overview of the implementation process of PRACE see the slides of Francesco Subirada.

HPC System Administrator
Immediate employment or by agreement.
This is a full-time position.

For additional information on the position, have a look at

http://www5.epfl.ch/emplois/page41531.html

Programmer or System Engineer
with emphasis on High Performance Computing
Immediate employment or by arrangement. This is a 100% post.

As a part of its high–end computing and networking strategy, the University of Zürich has for some time had a number of high-performance computer clusters in operation. As of mid-2009, the facultiy of mathematics and natural science, together with IT Services, took a new 50 TFlop Linux-Cluster from SUN into service. The position is open in the HPC team of the university.

For additional information on the opening, have a look at

http://www.id.uzh.ch/index/100802-HPCN-EN.pdf

CSCS has been appointed as the first Center of Excellence in Europe. “One of the HPC Advisory Council’s main activities is community and education outreach, in particular, through enhancing the HPC knowledge-base around the world and exploring future solutions,” said Gilad Shainer, chairman of the HPC Advisory Council. “The HPC Advisory Council Centers of Excellence are located worldwide and will extend the activities of the council into local areas and focus on the regional needs for furthering our HPC outreach activities.”

“We are pleased to be named as one the inaugural HPC Advisory Council’s Centers of Excellence, covering HPC research, outreach and educational activities within Europe,” said Hussein Nasser El-Harake at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre who serves as the Director of the HPC Advisory Council Center of Excellence in Switzerland. “As part of the HPC Advisory Council’s Center of Excellence, we look forward to advancing awareness of the beneficial capabilities of HPC to new users.”

For more information about the HPC Advisory Council, please visit www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com.

Wednesday 18 August 2010 14:00 - Wednesday 25 August 2010 - 14:00
Multiple scales analyses and numerics for atmospheric flows
hosted by Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)

Thursday 19 August 2010, 14:00 - 16:00
Cubic regularization algorithm and complexity issues for nonconvex optimization
hosted by Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)

Wednesday 8 September 2010, 13:00 - 15:00
Extreme Performance Engineering: Petascale and Heterogeneous Systems
hosted by CSCS

You are cordially invited to participate to these talks.

One of the HPC Advisory Council’s main activities is community and education outreach. The University Award program is an outgrowth of this, and is intended to enhance students’ computing knowledge-base as early as possible.

“HPC is critically important to our economy and future, and its role is growing both in research and industry,” said Gilad Shainer, chairman of the HPC Advisory Council. “The University Award program is part of our ongoing effort to encourage and provide incentives for HPC education and advancement. We look forward to reviewing proposals, and working with the winners to highlight their research and further advances in HPC technology and education.”

“This is an excellent opportunity for students around the world to bring their research to life and highlight the end results to the HPC community,” said Hussein Nasser El-Harake at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS who serves as the Director of the HPC Advisory Council Center of Excellence in Switzerland. “As part of the HPC Advisory Council’s award submission review team, we look forward to reviewing what students have planned for utilizing the performance power of clusters to solve interesting and important problems.”

Winners will be provided with the following:

1. Exclusive computation time on the HPC Advisory Council’s Compute Center
2. Invitation to present the research results at one of the HPC Advisory Council’s worldwide workshops, including sponsorship of travel expenses (according to the Council Award Program rules)
3. Publication of the research results on the HPC Advisory Council website and related publications
4. Publication of the research results and a demonstration, if applicable, within the HPC Advisory Council world-wide technology demonstration activities

Proposals for the 2011 HPC Advisory Council University Award Program can be submitted from August 1, 2010 through October 30, 2010 at the HPC Advisory Council website. The selected proposal(s) will be determined by November 15th and the winner(s) will be notified.

For more information and registration, please visit the HPC Advisory Council website.

(Cross Posting from the CSCS news page)

The single cabinet, 20 blade system, contains 160 compute sockets and uses the new 2.1GHz, 12-core AMD Opteron (aka Magny-Cours) CPUs for a total of 1920 compute cores.  The machine, which has been named Piz Palu, has a theoretical peak performance of 16TFlop/s and 2.5 Terabytes of memory. Furthermore the machine contains Cray’s next generation interconnect network, named Gemini, which promises increased performance and fault tolerance over the previous generation SeaStar technology.  Moreover the Gemini interconnect promises better support for Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages such as Co-array Fortran (CAF) and Unified Parallel C (UPC).  This Cray XE6 system is part of a joint collaboration between Cray and CSCS, and will enable CSCS and its user community to undertake testing and early familiarization with Cray’s next generation hardware and software technologies.

The opening of the CSCS channel is a good chance to have a view to some previous talks at CSCS.

For example “The Physics and Experiments at the LHC” (see previous blog posting):

Or the talk of Kathleen Kobe on “Concurrent Collections (CnC): A new approach to parallel programming” (see previous blog posting).

Or the CRAY XT5 code porting workshop of 2009.

In the TOP500 ranking Rosa started at rank 23 (June 2009), moved after an upgrade to position 21 (November 2009) and is now at position 27 (June 2010).

We created a movie showing the assembly of Monte Rosa, if you want to have a look click on the image here below or follow this link »