Key note Wednesday

This year, Wednesday is the day of the joint SPScicomP and SPXXL sessions. This day was opened by Francesc Subirada, Associate Director BSC. He welcomed all participants of ScicomP and SPXXL and gave a brief overview of the role of BSC as a supercomputing center in Europe and the role of supercomputing in Europe in general. He especially mentioned and underlined the importance of the European PRACE project.


The first talk of the key note session was given by Jesus Labarta. He introduced the project MareInconito - the undiscovered, unconquered ocean. The aim of this project is to design a 10+ Petaflops supercomputer by 2010/11 in cooperation with IBM. This supercomputer is going to be the Spanish contribution to PRACE.
Based on the Cell processor it will be usable for a broad spectrum of applications. The project is subdivided into six focus areas from Programming models over Performance and analysis tools to hardware like Interconnect and processor.
Within this project the StarSs - Star Superscalar suite is being developed, CellSs and SMPSs are already available today.


John Romein, Stichting ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) presented the LOFAR project - The LOw Frequency ARray. LOFAR is composed of antennas distributed over large parts of the Netherlands and North-Western Germany. Combined they form the world's largest radio telescope. The data from those antennas are gathered and centrally processed using a BlueGene/P supercomputer (2.5 racks right now).


Thomas Lippert, head of the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany talked about the ongoing changes at his center which is about to become the most powerful supercomputing site in Europe. When stressing the importance of supercomputing and the race for even more powerful systems, he stated that concerning climate change, "we need a crystal ball and our crystal ball is supercomputing."
In his opinion, it is today unknown, if there ever applications exist, which can make efficient use of exascale compute power. Since there are scientific problems, which demand even more compute power, the motivation must be to find ways to leverage these compute power with new and improved algorithms and applications.

Jülich is going to be a European tier-0 Computing center in 2010. In preparation for that, the German Research School for Simulation Science has been founded which now attracts top scientists from around the world.
The Blue Gene is currently being updated and will be in service within the next weeks offering 1020 TFlops peak performance - the first European PetaFlop system.

In addition QPace was mentioned. QPace is a development project aiming at providing a computer specially suited for QCD Applications. It is expected to perform with 25.6 TFlops per Rack.