Wrap up of an inspiring EuroHPC Summit Week 2019
A packed plenary programme offered the attendees fascinating insights into scientific and industrial achievements. An update on the activities of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) was presented by Thomas Skordas (Director of DG CONNECT, Directorate C “Digital Excellence and Science Infrastructure” of the European Commission, and Vice Chair of the EuroHPC Governing Board) during the Opening Plenary. Highlights of the conference were the scientific keynotes given by Marina Bécoulet (CEA) “Challenges of First Principle Modelling and Role of HPC in Magnetic Fusion” and Vadim Monteiller (CNRS) “In Memoriam – Dimitri Komatitsch”, and the industrial keynote by Julien Harou (University of Manchester) “Water Resource Modelling” and Ange Caruso (EDF) “Modelling and simulation issues at EDF enabling energy challenges”. How to tackle the different needs of Big Data projects and the increasing demands of HPC were important topics during the plenary as well. The Big Data and Extreme-scale Computing (BDEC) provided a European and international view on this challenge on Wednesday morning. The two keynotes given by David Eyes (KAUST) and Rosa Badia (BSC) emphasised the challenges and expectations, and potential solutions for the “Digital continuum” on which the next generation platforms reply, tackling with heterogeneity of data and computing resources. The international BDEC consortium agreed during its meeting in Poznań on two demonstrators of such platforms, involving a panel of experts coming from both the major HPC regions in the world, but also the entire value chain: from machines to users, including participants from LHC, SKA and CNES. EuroHPC was present in several conference sessions, with a very successful EuroHPC Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session to share information on the organisation and workings of EuroHPC with the HPC community at large. Several sessions were dedicated to specific EuroHPC issues, such as the EuroHPC Mini-Symposium – Co-Design Workshop. The HPC Ecosystem Summit gave a good platform to stakeholders to discuss how to create a coherent HPC landscape including access to HPC resources, services for users and research. The summit helped to clarify the future roles of each actor in the field and was followed by an HPC Ecosystem Plenary and a number of HPC Ecosystem Workshops on Thursday afternoon, organised by EXDCI-2. Those workshops gave an overview of the European effort and results in HPC, with the presentation of the new Strategic Research Agenda from ETP4HPC, the analysis of the rich results of the EU FET HPC projects, and the upcoming works of EuroLab4HPC. The workshops also included sessions on future technologies and how they can be used in HPC, as well as on the future of legacy codes, which all triggered lively exchanges between attendees. PRACE held the 6th edition of the PRACE Scientific and Industrial Conference (PRACEdays19) as part of the EuroHPC Summit Week 2019. PRACEdays19 included eight parallel scientific tracks and one industrial track in afternoon sessions from Tuesday to Wednesday. Towards the end of the conference, Serge Bogaerts, EXDCI-2 Coordinator and PRACE Managing Director, announced the PRACE Award winners. All information, abstracts, presentations, and other details about the EuroHPC Summit Week 2019 and its sessions can be found here: https://events.prace-ri.eu/event/850