Final Report Summary - HPC-EUROPA2 (Pan-European Research infrastructure on High Performance Computing for 21st century Science)
Executive Summary:
HPC-Europa, one of the best known brand-names in the HPC ecosystem, is the project series that for more than 10 years has provided TA to the HPC most advanced systems in EU.
The programme has always been seen by researchers as a unique opportunity to advance their work through the use of powerful HPC facilities and the acquisition of new insight into their research gained from a period of actual integration into another group and the in house support of the different centres.
HPC-Europa2 (integrating CINECA, BSC, EPCC, HLRS, GENCI, SARA and CSC) is focused on providing:
• Access to the major European HPC infrastructures, via a single application and international peer-review process, free of charge and with minimal administrative overhead
• A full range of HPC services
• Tuition in the usage of the most advanced HPC facilities
• Scientific collaboration within an extremely wide network of scientific host labs in all the computational sciences domains
Based on the former autonomous projects of CINECA, EPCC and BSC (CEPBA-CESCA), HPC-Europa rationalized in one TA integrated project the most advanced HPC facilities in EU and a established formidable network of more than 1000 labs acting as researchers hosting sites, to provide researchers with scientific tutoring in computational sciences and real on-site opportunity of cooperative and collaborative test-bed for new researches and new scientific collaborations.
TA (support for travelling and physically visiting the centres) and a tremendous network of scientific labs to collaborate with are definitely the two outstanding strengths of HPCE tradition, on which the EU scientific community lean on.
The successful HPCE line action has continued to progressively reduce the digital divide between the large and the small countries and mostly the eastern ones, which receive great benefit from it. Indeed, while the large countries may support both mobility and access service in domestic forms for their scientific community (e.g. the programmes by EPSRC in UK, ISCRA in Italy, RES in Spain), the small countries, with less history in the field of Computational Science, experience many difficulties.
Currently in complement with PRACE, The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), the RI providing a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe, implementing the ESFRI recommendation for the creation of the HPC pyramid model in EU, the main aim of HPCE2 has always been to contribute to the implementation of the ERA providing high quality services to support Transnational Access to some of the most relevant HPC infrastructures at EU and regional level for a very large user base of scientists in a broad range of disciplinary domains, like Environmental and Earth Sciences, Energy, Biological Sciences, Engineering, Material Sciences, Physical Sciences, Mathematics.
Project Context and Objectives:
The main objective of HPC-Europa2 is to continue providing a high-quality service for transnational access to the advanced HPC systems available in Europe. This activity has been available on an ongoing basis as a highly rated and trusted service for almost two decades. The project is organised around its core activity – the transnational access HPC service provision. Indeed, over its four-year lifetime, transnational access provides HPC services, specialist support, scientific tutoring and opportunities for collaboration to some 1000 European researchers. This very large community of users is provided with a huge amount of CPU hours of computing time.
Each visitor is guided by a scientific host, working locally in a related field, who provides office space and a specialised scientific tutoring. The supercomputing centres are CINECA (Italy), EPCC (the UK), BSC (Spain),HLRS (Germany), GENCI-CINES (France), SARA (the Netherlands) and CSC (Finland).
HPC-Europa2’s transnational access activity allows any researcher from an eligible country, whose work could benefit from HPC, to visit one of a number of supercomputing centres for up to three months, with all expenses paid. Over the course of the project, hundreds of European researchers, from postgraduates to senior professors, will benefit from this opportunity.
In details, the TA service provision in the specific context is centered around
• access to HPC systems
• experts who provide HPC specialist support
• scientific collaboration with hosting labs
The project is based on a programme of periods of visit, in the form of traditional transnational access to RIs, with researchers visiting HPC centres and/or scientific hosts who will accompany them with a scientific and technical tutoring action.
A number of leading HPC centres distributed all around EU provide access to their HPC infrastructures, offering different and complementary HPC architectures and providing advanced competences in all fields of computational sciences.
Some 1000 specialized host research labs complement the action, that benefits also of:
• a common detailed access management procedure
• a single international Scientific Selection Panel
• a coordinated strategy for marketing, outreach, dissemination.
NAs and JRAs have been, during the 4 years lifespan, strongly integrated with the central HPC TA activity, with the main objective of further enhancing and improving the quality of the access offered, making each visitor fully integrated into the local scientific host lab and also the local HPC community, to benefit from relevant expertise during the visit and to build links that proved to be of great benefit in the future research career.
The potential for productive scientific collaboration is a major motivating factor for HPC-Europa2 visits and is as important as the need to use HPC. Encouraging collaboration between research groups is key to ensuring that European researchers maintain their competitive edge on the world stage. The visit aspect is of primary importance to the users. For the first time in HPC-Europa2, “virtual visits” have been offered, in which researchers use the HPC facilities from their institutes, while undertaking remote collaboration. There has been a relatively low uptake of “virtual visits”: they do not match what people are looking for from HPCE.
No other programme offers the unique combination of opportunities granted by this one: a strong and continuous demand have been shown and it is clear that HPC-Europa2 plays a crucial role in preparing researchers for access to the highest level of RI in EU and that this is most of value for young researchers and those coming from countries which are only now becoming significantly involved in large-scale computations.
HPC-Europa has been funded under FP3, FP4 and FP5 by means of three separate programmes at CEPBA-CESCA, CINECA and EPCC and under FP6 and FP7 jointly as HPC-Europa (2004-2007), HPC-Europa++ (2008) and HPC-Europa2 (2009-2012). 11 partners compose the current consortium, of which 7 offer TA and 4 are involved in the related NAs and JRAs which provide added value to the visitor programme.
Over the 4 years lifespan, the TA has the objective of providing HPC service, specialist support, scientific tutoring and collaboration opportunities to about 1000 European researchers (1096 in total with about the 25% of them accessing the facilities remotely). The project serves a very large community of users, providing them with some 90 million of AUs. An AU is defined as “the computational power delivered by a computer executing for one hour at the sustained rate of one GFlops/s”.
The table below shows the targets related to the access activity for the whole project lifetime.
Participant number
Organisation short name Operator
country code
Unit of access
Estimated unit cost (€) Min. quantity of access to be provided Access costs charged to the GA
Estimated number of users Estimated number of projects
1 CINECA IT AU 0,05 8.200.000 410.000 200 200
2 EPCC UK AU 0,02 19.500.000 390.000 206 206
3 BSC-CNS ES AU 0,02 21.000.000 420.000 240 240
4 USTUTT-HLRS DE AU 0,09 4.250.000 382.500 170 170
5 GENCI FR AU 0,04 9.000.000 360.000 120 120
6 SARA NL AU 0,04 6.562.500 262.500 100 100
7 CSC FI AU 0,05 2.625.000 131.250 60 60
Besides the 7 WPs focused on the TA (one for each HPC center involved), the workplan foresees 3 Networking WPs and 3 Joint Research Action WPs. NAs and JRAs have the common objective of strengthening the environment in which the TA visitors perform their work and, in general, the European Research Area.
NA1, co-ordinating the TA activities at consortium level, aims at homogenising and integrating the access activity between the partners, at increasing the number of applications, as well as at disseminating the project activities, initiative and the researchers’ results.
NA2 was in charge of all the gluing aspects external to the project, facilitating and cooperating in the establishment of a solid and effective HPC Ecosystem at European level. NA2 aimed at enhancing the visibility of the HPC-Europa brand to the scientific community around Europe and at world level and at enlarging the user community involving a larger number of countries and research fields and groups.
NA3 is the tool for integrating and improving the support to the users accessing to the HPC facility, on the one hand improving the support, consultancy and training activities dedicated to HPC-Europa users and, on the other, improving the support of collaborative meeting tools based on existing infrastructures; in other words acting for facilitating the effective usage and exploitation of massive parallel architectures, ensuring the diffusion of the related know-how and competencies, sharing them between experts and introducing them to newcomers and beginners in the field.
Besides NAs, HPC-Europa2 includes three JRAs:
JRA1: HPC on Massively Parallel Architectures: Programmeming models;
JRA2: Virtual Cluster;
JRA3: Tools for Scientific Data Services.
The JRA1 (with a duration of 24 months) general aim was to face aspects of paramount importance for the scientists involved in computational sciences, exploring, experiencing, testing and analyzing innovative solutions for parallel computing on massive parallel architectures, starting from the analysis of the state of the art and from the best practise already structured and achieved by external and expert relevant groups to be involved and kept aware of the outputs of the activity.
The aim of JRA2, concluded at PM36, was to help the TA visitors with the development and parallelization of applications, as well with the actual deployment on the TA site’s machines, which offer quite heterogeneous architectures. In order to ease the deployment of the user’s application, it is important to provide the visitor an early experience on parallel machines and methodologies. Main objectives were to provide the final HPC-Europa2 of a Virtual Cluster Live CD/DVD to TA guests to support them experience parallel programmeming, to integrate the beneficiaries parallel tools and to provide support for HPC infrastructure and immersive datastore.
JRA3 activity, concluded at PM36, aimed at developing data-grid tools with flexible and powerful meta-data capabilities, in particular innovative solutions for scientific data management, search and filtering, and tools for high-level data-analysis to investigate and describe complex data-relationships. Specific objectives for the activity were to provide definite tools for the distributed storage of large data-sets across many sites, to describe the data with complex metadata which can be searched, to abstract meta-data can be provided for the data-sets, which allow for a higher-level structuring, understanding and filtering, to provide tools which enable the scientific groups an efficient data-handling with respect to data-storage and -retrieval, categorization of data, high-level structuring of data, data-sharing.
Project Results:
We consider the main achievements of HPC-Europa2 (and the previous programmes) to be the following:
• Wide participation of the EU computational science community
➢ More than 2500 visits in total on the programmes
➢ 970 visits in HPC-Europa2
➢ Applications from almost all eligible countries and a wide range of disciplines
➢ Over 1000 researchers in more than 200 research groups in 7 countries associated as hosts
➢ Scientific output – 258 publications so far in HPC-Europa2
➢ Benefits to the European computational science community
➢ HPC consultancy and support for novice and experienced users alike
➢ Training on a variety of HPC topics, via a series of regular online tutorials and access to a training repository
➢ New user groups gained exposure to HPC which allowed them to acquire skills to do further work and even to set up HPC facilities back in home country
➢ Annual user group meetings allow users of all levels an early opportunity to present their work and present opportunities for new collaborations to be formed: in some cases these are cross-disciplinary collaborations which are unlikely to have happened otherwise; these meetings are truly interdisciplinary events which have been praised for their “community spirit”
➢ Visitor success stories: joint publications, repeat or reciprocal visits, new joint research grants and visitors gaining research posts in their former host departments
➢ A irreplaceable first step to lead users on to subsequent PRACE projects
➢ Successful project management:
➢ Strong working relationship between some of the leading HPC centres in EU
➢ Well-established model for access provision
➢ Application and selection procedure deemed to be transparent and fair
➢ Implementation of a versatile and powerful web database tool for applicants, reviewers and consortium members
➢ Endorsement from the members of the independent Scientific Users Selection Panel.
The support offered by HPC-Europa2, in term of access to the major European HPC infrastructures and of collaboration with a huge number of labs, gave a huge number of researchers the opportunity to publish their work. In detail over the 4 years of the project we registered (complete list available):
• 207 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals
• 4 chapters/sections of published books
• 47 articles in conference proceedings
Potential Impact:
Nowadays, in the HPC European panorama, with PRACE, the academic sector is pooling its leadership-class computing systems as a single infrastructure. Critical mass is achieved and access to these top-of-the-range HPC systems is provided based on scientific excellence rather than the geographical location of a researcher.
HPC-Europa is by the way highly relevant to the HPC science community and is much in demand, offering a unique opportunity: the provision of on-site access to HPC facilities in combination with (expenses-paid) international collaborative visits. Each funded project benefits two EU research groups: that of the visitor, and that of the host.
While PRACE offers large allocations of time to team with exceptional computational demands and the existing proved knowledge to use the resources, HPC-Europa represents a necessary stepping-stone for people without access to such facilities or experience of using them. By providing smaller – but still considerable – amounts of resources supplemented by access to consultancy and outstanding scientific support, HPC-Europa has made PRACE more accessible to the EU research community and helped Europe being more competitive at world-wide level.
Regarding dissemination, all HPC-Europa2 project partners, including those who did not offer Transnational Access (TA), played an active role throughout the project lifetime in publicising the programme to the European computational science community. The new TA partners, who joined the consortium at the start of this contract, and the non-TA partners, who were not previously involved in advertising the programme, all made excellent contributions to this activity, which aimed to attract applications from a wide range of both scientific disciplines and geographic areas.
The regular outreach and marketing activities centred on identifying new individuals and research groups who might be interested in the programme, and on keeping in touch with existing contacts to notify them of upcoming closing dates and to inform them of any other news from the consortium.
Calls for Applications were launched four times per year, and the marketing focus sessions were scheduled approximately 6-8 weeks before each closing date to ensure that the information reached potential applicants with ample time for them to prepare their proposals thoroughly before submitting them.
Nevertheless, publicity was a constant effort throughout the whole project lifetime, with regular HPC-Europa2 newsletters circulated by email to subscribers, publicity material distributed at appropriate events, such as courses, summer schools and conferences, and continuous outreach activities to new contacts.
Outreach activities fall under the following general categories:
• Webpage updates – HPC-Europa2 webpage and partners’ own webpages and related pages;
• Electronic publicity – Call for Applications posted to relevant newsgroups and mailing lists, via social media (LinkedIn, Twitter), and announced in iSGTW;
• Paper mailings - poster, leaflet and paper copy of Call for Applications;
• Articles in partners’ in-house newsletter and similar publications;
• Support from HPC-Europa2 stakeholders (local researchers, SUSP members, former visitors);
• Support from relevant European scientific networks and research councils, eg the British Council and TÜBITAK – Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, CCPs (Collaborative Computational Projects), Spanish Astrophysics / Chemistry / Physics Associations;
• Presence at scientific conferences and other relevant events;
• Search for new research groups who have not previously benefited from HPC-Europa2.
The HPC-Europa2 consortium webpage was updated regularly with news from the consortium, such as announcements about upcoming “virtual surgeries” (see WP4: NA3 Training, Consultancy and Communication of the HPC Culture), details of the user group meeting TAM, and all of the project newsletters. The partners’ own webpages were also updated regularly with consortium news, and in the previous reporting period videos were produced to make the pages more interactive and interesting – these gave an overview of the programme and featured interviews with visitors and hosts. Links with other relevant European projects such as PRACE were exploited, with reciprocal publicity carried out for respective closing dates and other relevant announcements.
The decision to make the repository of HPC-Europa2 training material and access to the “virtual surgeries” available to anyone was also clearly beneficial as a publicity tool for the programme, allowing any visitor to the webpage to view these, while anyone who received an announcement of an upcoming surgery could forward it to their own contacts, who may have had no previous connection to HPC-Europa2. This in turn could only lead to an increased general awareness of the programme among the HPC community at large.
The HPC-Europa2 group on LinkedIn was used extensively to announce Calls for Applications, to publicise upcoming events such as courses, workshops and “virtual surgeries”, and to announce any other relevant news eg new supercomputers installed at the partner centres, new rankings in the Top500, job vacancies and scholarship opportunities, etc. The group is open to anyone, and while most of the 147 members have been personally involved with the programme (consortium partners, SUSP members, former visitors and hosts), a few have no obvious direct connection with HPC-Europa2, which shows that it was successful in reaching a broader range of people in the HPC community. Calls for Applications have also been posted as “Discussions” in the unrelated “HPC & Big Data (Europe)” LinkedIn group, which has over 2000 members.
Although there was not a specific HPC-Europa2 Twitter account, most partner centres have their own accounts and would “tweet” announcements such as the Call for Applications and “virtual surgeries”. Again this reached a wider audience of, it is to be assumed, mostly relevant contacts, due to the need for people to subscribe.
All the visitors’ reports were collected and published in annual directories, distributed in huge quantity of copies among the stakeholders.
List of Websites:
www.hpc-europa.eu
Contact Person
Francesca Garofalo
CINECA
f.garofalo@cineca.it
+39-051-6171661
HPC-Europa, one of the best known brand-names in the HPC ecosystem, is the project series that for more than 10 years has provided TA to the HPC most advanced systems in EU.
The programme has always been seen by researchers as a unique opportunity to advance their work through the use of powerful HPC facilities and the acquisition of new insight into their research gained from a period of actual integration into another group and the in house support of the different centres.
HPC-Europa2 (integrating CINECA, BSC, EPCC, HLRS, GENCI, SARA and CSC) is focused on providing:
• Access to the major European HPC infrastructures, via a single application and international peer-review process, free of charge and with minimal administrative overhead
• A full range of HPC services
• Tuition in the usage of the most advanced HPC facilities
• Scientific collaboration within an extremely wide network of scientific host labs in all the computational sciences domains
Based on the former autonomous projects of CINECA, EPCC and BSC (CEPBA-CESCA), HPC-Europa rationalized in one TA integrated project the most advanced HPC facilities in EU and a established formidable network of more than 1000 labs acting as researchers hosting sites, to provide researchers with scientific tutoring in computational sciences and real on-site opportunity of cooperative and collaborative test-bed for new researches and new scientific collaborations.
TA (support for travelling and physically visiting the centres) and a tremendous network of scientific labs to collaborate with are definitely the two outstanding strengths of HPCE tradition, on which the EU scientific community lean on.
The successful HPCE line action has continued to progressively reduce the digital divide between the large and the small countries and mostly the eastern ones, which receive great benefit from it. Indeed, while the large countries may support both mobility and access service in domestic forms for their scientific community (e.g. the programmes by EPSRC in UK, ISCRA in Italy, RES in Spain), the small countries, with less history in the field of Computational Science, experience many difficulties.
Currently in complement with PRACE, The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), the RI providing a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe, implementing the ESFRI recommendation for the creation of the HPC pyramid model in EU, the main aim of HPCE2 has always been to contribute to the implementation of the ERA providing high quality services to support Transnational Access to some of the most relevant HPC infrastructures at EU and regional level for a very large user base of scientists in a broad range of disciplinary domains, like Environmental and Earth Sciences, Energy, Biological Sciences, Engineering, Material Sciences, Physical Sciences, Mathematics.
Project Context and Objectives:
The main objective of HPC-Europa2 is to continue providing a high-quality service for transnational access to the advanced HPC systems available in Europe. This activity has been available on an ongoing basis as a highly rated and trusted service for almost two decades. The project is organised around its core activity – the transnational access HPC service provision. Indeed, over its four-year lifetime, transnational access provides HPC services, specialist support, scientific tutoring and opportunities for collaboration to some 1000 European researchers. This very large community of users is provided with a huge amount of CPU hours of computing time.
Each visitor is guided by a scientific host, working locally in a related field, who provides office space and a specialised scientific tutoring. The supercomputing centres are CINECA (Italy), EPCC (the UK), BSC (Spain),HLRS (Germany), GENCI-CINES (France), SARA (the Netherlands) and CSC (Finland).
HPC-Europa2’s transnational access activity allows any researcher from an eligible country, whose work could benefit from HPC, to visit one of a number of supercomputing centres for up to three months, with all expenses paid. Over the course of the project, hundreds of European researchers, from postgraduates to senior professors, will benefit from this opportunity.
In details, the TA service provision in the specific context is centered around
• access to HPC systems
• experts who provide HPC specialist support
• scientific collaboration with hosting labs
The project is based on a programme of periods of visit, in the form of traditional transnational access to RIs, with researchers visiting HPC centres and/or scientific hosts who will accompany them with a scientific and technical tutoring action.
A number of leading HPC centres distributed all around EU provide access to their HPC infrastructures, offering different and complementary HPC architectures and providing advanced competences in all fields of computational sciences.
Some 1000 specialized host research labs complement the action, that benefits also of:
• a common detailed access management procedure
• a single international Scientific Selection Panel
• a coordinated strategy for marketing, outreach, dissemination.
NAs and JRAs have been, during the 4 years lifespan, strongly integrated with the central HPC TA activity, with the main objective of further enhancing and improving the quality of the access offered, making each visitor fully integrated into the local scientific host lab and also the local HPC community, to benefit from relevant expertise during the visit and to build links that proved to be of great benefit in the future research career.
The potential for productive scientific collaboration is a major motivating factor for HPC-Europa2 visits and is as important as the need to use HPC. Encouraging collaboration between research groups is key to ensuring that European researchers maintain their competitive edge on the world stage. The visit aspect is of primary importance to the users. For the first time in HPC-Europa2, “virtual visits” have been offered, in which researchers use the HPC facilities from their institutes, while undertaking remote collaboration. There has been a relatively low uptake of “virtual visits”: they do not match what people are looking for from HPCE.
No other programme offers the unique combination of opportunities granted by this one: a strong and continuous demand have been shown and it is clear that HPC-Europa2 plays a crucial role in preparing researchers for access to the highest level of RI in EU and that this is most of value for young researchers and those coming from countries which are only now becoming significantly involved in large-scale computations.
HPC-Europa has been funded under FP3, FP4 and FP5 by means of three separate programmes at CEPBA-CESCA, CINECA and EPCC and under FP6 and FP7 jointly as HPC-Europa (2004-2007), HPC-Europa++ (2008) and HPC-Europa2 (2009-2012). 11 partners compose the current consortium, of which 7 offer TA and 4 are involved in the related NAs and JRAs which provide added value to the visitor programme.
Over the 4 years lifespan, the TA has the objective of providing HPC service, specialist support, scientific tutoring and collaboration opportunities to about 1000 European researchers (1096 in total with about the 25% of them accessing the facilities remotely). The project serves a very large community of users, providing them with some 90 million of AUs. An AU is defined as “the computational power delivered by a computer executing for one hour at the sustained rate of one GFlops/s”.
The table below shows the targets related to the access activity for the whole project lifetime.
Participant number
Organisation short name Operator
country code
Unit of access
Estimated unit cost (€) Min. quantity of access to be provided Access costs charged to the GA
Estimated number of users Estimated number of projects
1 CINECA IT AU 0,05 8.200.000 410.000 200 200
2 EPCC UK AU 0,02 19.500.000 390.000 206 206
3 BSC-CNS ES AU 0,02 21.000.000 420.000 240 240
4 USTUTT-HLRS DE AU 0,09 4.250.000 382.500 170 170
5 GENCI FR AU 0,04 9.000.000 360.000 120 120
6 SARA NL AU 0,04 6.562.500 262.500 100 100
7 CSC FI AU 0,05 2.625.000 131.250 60 60
Besides the 7 WPs focused on the TA (one for each HPC center involved), the workplan foresees 3 Networking WPs and 3 Joint Research Action WPs. NAs and JRAs have the common objective of strengthening the environment in which the TA visitors perform their work and, in general, the European Research Area.
NA1, co-ordinating the TA activities at consortium level, aims at homogenising and integrating the access activity between the partners, at increasing the number of applications, as well as at disseminating the project activities, initiative and the researchers’ results.
NA2 was in charge of all the gluing aspects external to the project, facilitating and cooperating in the establishment of a solid and effective HPC Ecosystem at European level. NA2 aimed at enhancing the visibility of the HPC-Europa brand to the scientific community around Europe and at world level and at enlarging the user community involving a larger number of countries and research fields and groups.
NA3 is the tool for integrating and improving the support to the users accessing to the HPC facility, on the one hand improving the support, consultancy and training activities dedicated to HPC-Europa users and, on the other, improving the support of collaborative meeting tools based on existing infrastructures; in other words acting for facilitating the effective usage and exploitation of massive parallel architectures, ensuring the diffusion of the related know-how and competencies, sharing them between experts and introducing them to newcomers and beginners in the field.
Besides NAs, HPC-Europa2 includes three JRAs:
JRA1: HPC on Massively Parallel Architectures: Programmeming models;
JRA2: Virtual Cluster;
JRA3: Tools for Scientific Data Services.
The JRA1 (with a duration of 24 months) general aim was to face aspects of paramount importance for the scientists involved in computational sciences, exploring, experiencing, testing and analyzing innovative solutions for parallel computing on massive parallel architectures, starting from the analysis of the state of the art and from the best practise already structured and achieved by external and expert relevant groups to be involved and kept aware of the outputs of the activity.
The aim of JRA2, concluded at PM36, was to help the TA visitors with the development and parallelization of applications, as well with the actual deployment on the TA site’s machines, which offer quite heterogeneous architectures. In order to ease the deployment of the user’s application, it is important to provide the visitor an early experience on parallel machines and methodologies. Main objectives were to provide the final HPC-Europa2 of a Virtual Cluster Live CD/DVD to TA guests to support them experience parallel programmeming, to integrate the beneficiaries parallel tools and to provide support for HPC infrastructure and immersive datastore.
JRA3 activity, concluded at PM36, aimed at developing data-grid tools with flexible and powerful meta-data capabilities, in particular innovative solutions for scientific data management, search and filtering, and tools for high-level data-analysis to investigate and describe complex data-relationships. Specific objectives for the activity were to provide definite tools for the distributed storage of large data-sets across many sites, to describe the data with complex metadata which can be searched, to abstract meta-data can be provided for the data-sets, which allow for a higher-level structuring, understanding and filtering, to provide tools which enable the scientific groups an efficient data-handling with respect to data-storage and -retrieval, categorization of data, high-level structuring of data, data-sharing.
Project Results:
We consider the main achievements of HPC-Europa2 (and the previous programmes) to be the following:
• Wide participation of the EU computational science community
➢ More than 2500 visits in total on the programmes
➢ 970 visits in HPC-Europa2
➢ Applications from almost all eligible countries and a wide range of disciplines
➢ Over 1000 researchers in more than 200 research groups in 7 countries associated as hosts
➢ Scientific output – 258 publications so far in HPC-Europa2
➢ Benefits to the European computational science community
➢ HPC consultancy and support for novice and experienced users alike
➢ Training on a variety of HPC topics, via a series of regular online tutorials and access to a training repository
➢ New user groups gained exposure to HPC which allowed them to acquire skills to do further work and even to set up HPC facilities back in home country
➢ Annual user group meetings allow users of all levels an early opportunity to present their work and present opportunities for new collaborations to be formed: in some cases these are cross-disciplinary collaborations which are unlikely to have happened otherwise; these meetings are truly interdisciplinary events which have been praised for their “community spirit”
➢ Visitor success stories: joint publications, repeat or reciprocal visits, new joint research grants and visitors gaining research posts in their former host departments
➢ A irreplaceable first step to lead users on to subsequent PRACE projects
➢ Successful project management:
➢ Strong working relationship between some of the leading HPC centres in EU
➢ Well-established model for access provision
➢ Application and selection procedure deemed to be transparent and fair
➢ Implementation of a versatile and powerful web database tool for applicants, reviewers and consortium members
➢ Endorsement from the members of the independent Scientific Users Selection Panel.
The support offered by HPC-Europa2, in term of access to the major European HPC infrastructures and of collaboration with a huge number of labs, gave a huge number of researchers the opportunity to publish their work. In detail over the 4 years of the project we registered (complete list available):
• 207 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals
• 4 chapters/sections of published books
• 47 articles in conference proceedings
Potential Impact:
Nowadays, in the HPC European panorama, with PRACE, the academic sector is pooling its leadership-class computing systems as a single infrastructure. Critical mass is achieved and access to these top-of-the-range HPC systems is provided based on scientific excellence rather than the geographical location of a researcher.
HPC-Europa is by the way highly relevant to the HPC science community and is much in demand, offering a unique opportunity: the provision of on-site access to HPC facilities in combination with (expenses-paid) international collaborative visits. Each funded project benefits two EU research groups: that of the visitor, and that of the host.
While PRACE offers large allocations of time to team with exceptional computational demands and the existing proved knowledge to use the resources, HPC-Europa represents a necessary stepping-stone for people without access to such facilities or experience of using them. By providing smaller – but still considerable – amounts of resources supplemented by access to consultancy and outstanding scientific support, HPC-Europa has made PRACE more accessible to the EU research community and helped Europe being more competitive at world-wide level.
Regarding dissemination, all HPC-Europa2 project partners, including those who did not offer Transnational Access (TA), played an active role throughout the project lifetime in publicising the programme to the European computational science community. The new TA partners, who joined the consortium at the start of this contract, and the non-TA partners, who were not previously involved in advertising the programme, all made excellent contributions to this activity, which aimed to attract applications from a wide range of both scientific disciplines and geographic areas.
The regular outreach and marketing activities centred on identifying new individuals and research groups who might be interested in the programme, and on keeping in touch with existing contacts to notify them of upcoming closing dates and to inform them of any other news from the consortium.
Calls for Applications were launched four times per year, and the marketing focus sessions were scheduled approximately 6-8 weeks before each closing date to ensure that the information reached potential applicants with ample time for them to prepare their proposals thoroughly before submitting them.
Nevertheless, publicity was a constant effort throughout the whole project lifetime, with regular HPC-Europa2 newsletters circulated by email to subscribers, publicity material distributed at appropriate events, such as courses, summer schools and conferences, and continuous outreach activities to new contacts.
Outreach activities fall under the following general categories:
• Webpage updates – HPC-Europa2 webpage and partners’ own webpages and related pages;
• Electronic publicity – Call for Applications posted to relevant newsgroups and mailing lists, via social media (LinkedIn, Twitter), and announced in iSGTW;
• Paper mailings - poster, leaflet and paper copy of Call for Applications;
• Articles in partners’ in-house newsletter and similar publications;
• Support from HPC-Europa2 stakeholders (local researchers, SUSP members, former visitors);
• Support from relevant European scientific networks and research councils, eg the British Council and TÜBITAK – Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, CCPs (Collaborative Computational Projects), Spanish Astrophysics / Chemistry / Physics Associations;
• Presence at scientific conferences and other relevant events;
• Search for new research groups who have not previously benefited from HPC-Europa2.
The HPC-Europa2 consortium webpage was updated regularly with news from the consortium, such as announcements about upcoming “virtual surgeries” (see WP4: NA3 Training, Consultancy and Communication of the HPC Culture), details of the user group meeting TAM, and all of the project newsletters. The partners’ own webpages were also updated regularly with consortium news, and in the previous reporting period videos were produced to make the pages more interactive and interesting – these gave an overview of the programme and featured interviews with visitors and hosts. Links with other relevant European projects such as PRACE were exploited, with reciprocal publicity carried out for respective closing dates and other relevant announcements.
The decision to make the repository of HPC-Europa2 training material and access to the “virtual surgeries” available to anyone was also clearly beneficial as a publicity tool for the programme, allowing any visitor to the webpage to view these, while anyone who received an announcement of an upcoming surgery could forward it to their own contacts, who may have had no previous connection to HPC-Europa2. This in turn could only lead to an increased general awareness of the programme among the HPC community at large.
The HPC-Europa2 group on LinkedIn was used extensively to announce Calls for Applications, to publicise upcoming events such as courses, workshops and “virtual surgeries”, and to announce any other relevant news eg new supercomputers installed at the partner centres, new rankings in the Top500, job vacancies and scholarship opportunities, etc. The group is open to anyone, and while most of the 147 members have been personally involved with the programme (consortium partners, SUSP members, former visitors and hosts), a few have no obvious direct connection with HPC-Europa2, which shows that it was successful in reaching a broader range of people in the HPC community. Calls for Applications have also been posted as “Discussions” in the unrelated “HPC & Big Data (Europe)” LinkedIn group, which has over 2000 members.
Although there was not a specific HPC-Europa2 Twitter account, most partner centres have their own accounts and would “tweet” announcements such as the Call for Applications and “virtual surgeries”. Again this reached a wider audience of, it is to be assumed, mostly relevant contacts, due to the need for people to subscribe.
All the visitors’ reports were collected and published in annual directories, distributed in huge quantity of copies among the stakeholders.
List of Websites:
www.hpc-europa.eu
Contact Person
Francesca Garofalo
CINECA
f.garofalo@cineca.it
+39-051-6171661