Towards Maximising the PRACE e-Infrastructure

Expanding Scientific Frontiers through a pan-European Supercomputing Research Infrastructure

The beginning of the 21st century has seen the emergence of a global supercomputing arms race to deliver ‘Petascale’ computing. This is the computer equivalent of WMD - Weapons of Mass Discovery: Computing hardware with a peak performance measured in petaflop/s (10¹⁵ mathematical operations per second).
To put this into perspective, 10¹⁵ strands of hair laid side-by-side would stretch 50,000,000 km. With such an affluence of raw computing power, computational scientists can begin to investigate physical problems from the very large (e.g. cosmological scale) to the very small (atomic and subatomic scales) that would have seemed intractable just a few years earlier.
One European initiative - PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) - has been established to catapult European scientists into the petascale computing arena by introducing a permanent pan-European High Performance Computing research infrastructure. PRACE will be comprised of many interconnected ‘petaflop’ machines, to rival the computational resources of scientists in the U.S.A, Japan and China.
This massive undertaking will only be achievable through an ongoing programme of high-quality, cutting-edge training material and education. PRACE has, thanks to a recent survey, developed a programme of training and education to ensure its vision can be realised.

The PRACE HPC Training Portal

The PRACE training programme is hoping to implement a pan-European HPC training portal in association with the currently available PRACE project website. This portal will provide a diverse collection of high-quality training and educational material including HPC Educational Material, Podcasts, webinars, Technology Briefings, Discussion Forums and much more. This helps develop new knowledge but also keeps users abreast of news and cutting-edge developments which complement their training experiences.
As experts in the PRACE community continue to develop their own training, the best material will be selected and made available through the training portal via links and downloadable content.
E-learning allows PRACE users to receive training “on demand” to provide uninterrupted training excellence to complement that provided at organized PRACE training events. In many cases users may be unable to attend specific face-to-face PRACE training workshops due to location, cost or academic duties.
PRACE users will benefit from remote training tools to receive training support outside the scope of hosted training events. These Remote learning tools (such as the Access Grid) will be of particular value to those otherwise unable to travel distances to receive training.

Investment in Training is just as Important as the Hardware

For PRACE to build its vision of a world-class computing platform, it needs trained users. The EU is not alone in this realisation - recent Presidential reports in the US have described a worrisome decline in highly-qualified Computational Science professionals. If Europe continues to invest time and funding in competing with the U.S. on a purely petaflop/s basis, it is paramount that it also competes on delivering excellence in HPC training and education. The Prace HPC training eco-system will be the foundation of such an endeavour in Europe.