The Très Grand Centre de calcul of CEA (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives) has joined the Human Brain Project’s High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform. With this new partner, all PRACE members that provide large-scale supercomputing resources to the European research communities are now in the Human Brain Project. 

We are very happy to welcome the TGCC of @CEA_Recherche in our part of the project! With them, we have 5 leading #HPC centres in HPAC, all hosting members in @PRACE_RI

— HBP HPAC Platform (@HBPHighPerfComp) April 24, 2018

The HPAC Platform welcomed the colleagues from CEA (alongside new staff from existing partners) during a Kickoff Meeting for the new SGA2 project phase (April 2018 – March 2020). The meeting took place on 23-24 April in Frankfurt. Thomas Lippert, leader of HBP’s supercomputing subproject (Subproject 7), welcomed about 60 participants to the meeting and introduced them to the most important changes at the transition from SGA1 to SGA2, outlining the HBP Joint Platform and the soon-to-be established HBP High-Level Support Team.

We’re in Frankfurt today to kickoff the next phase of our project. @Tomtherhymer welcomes our about 60 HPAC participants in Frankfurt. Nice to meet you in person! pic.twitter.com/e7Ix1uzvy1

— HBP HPAC Platform (@HBPHighPerfComp) April 24, 2018

Other topics on the agenda were the new structure, focus and objectives of Subproject 7 (SP7), including the high-level use cases that will guide the research and development in SP7, as well as introductions by the work package leaders to their plans for the next two years. The participants got to know more details about the Fenix research infrastructure and the ICEI project that is about to start, and they had the opportunity to meet at work package level to discuss and agree on the next steps. The kickoff meeting finished with a session dedicated to the SP7-internal coordination including a summary of upcoming dates and next steps. 

The meeting was a very good starting point for the new activities in the next two years, with many interesting talks and fruitful discussions.

Many interesting talks about our plans, structure, focus, challenges and what’s new in general - now @DirkPleiter presents the plans for the Fenix infrastructure pic.twitter.com/WrCaXjYjGs

— HBP HPAC Platform (@HBPHighPerfComp) April 24, 2018

The HPAC Platform now has 14 partners from six European countries, five of them being leading supercomputing centres whose resources are available to the European research communities through PRACE. These are the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in Spain, the TGCC of CEA in France, Cineca in Italy, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany.

Our collaborators come from 14 institutions in Europe pic.twitter.com/nYAVOqNLSS

— HBP HPAC Platform (@HBPHighPerfComp) April 24, 2018

The technical integration of the resources at CEA has already started, so that the Curie supercomputer will be accessible in the same way as the systems of the other sites towards the end of this year. Curie is the first tier-0 HPC system that is available to scientists through the French participation in PRACE. It will soon be replaced by its successor system, which will then also be integrated into the HPAC Platform.

The Curie supercomputer.

Contact: Anna Lührs (a.luehrs@fz-juelich.de)