Taking a look back at the European Exascale Projects satellite event at PRACEdays15

With the aim in mind of establishing a platform for an intensive exchange between science and industry on the topic of Exascale computing, the European Exascale Projects organized a satellite event co-hosted to PRACEdays15 last week, May 26, 2015, in Dublin, Ireland. Jointly, CRESTA, EPiGRAM, EXA2CT, Mont-Blanc, Numexas and the DEEP and DEEP-ER projects put together a compelling programme with a special focus on mostly industrial HPC applications. The idea was to demonstrate with these applications how industry can benefit from the Exascale research efforts done in Europe. Starting with a keynote given by Dr. Eric Chaput from Airbus, the showcases presented were quite diverse ranging from aero thermal methods looked into at Rolls-Royce, to pharmaceutical HPC challenges at the Belgian company Janssen. Further examples were the support for current and future space missions like ESA’s Thor, and to embedded methods for industrial CFD applications.

After explaining the Cluster-Booster architecture and touching on the strong co-design efforts applied in the project, DEEP and DEEP-ER also shared two use cases: Gabriel Staffelbach from application partner CERFACS talked about combustion simulations and their strong technological (meaning also industrial) impact in e. g. environment and security or transport. Marc Tchiboudjian from application partner CGG gave insights into their work on seismic imaging as deployed in the oil and gas industry. Both speakers clearly explained, which advantages a DEEP/-ER Exascale-ready machine offers for their work as application developers, including amongst others a better performing architecture, increased parallelisation, faster and more affordable simulations or an easy-to-use software environment. (For more information, please see here.)

Speaking from a DEEP/-ER perspective, we enjoyed being part of and co-hosting this event. It provided a unique stage for exchanging ideas and discussing key aspects of Exascale research between science and industry. It was clearly shown that the research efforts carried out by the EC funded Exascale projects can be very beneficial for European industry. We really hope we can continue to nurture these links between science and industry and leverage them in the coming months and years. After all, we have set out from the beginning to develop an Exascale-ready machine to act as an enabler for industry and science.

Obviously, an event like this would not have been possible without some serious teamwork in place behind the scenes. Hence, we would like to especially thank our European Exascale partner projects to pull-off such a successful event together with us, to PRACE for giving us the opportunity to make use of the centre stage for a whole day at their conference and, last but surely not least, to ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing) for the tremendous onsite support.

Your DEEP/-ER Project Team