This year’s edition will take place 15-19 May in Barcelona, Spain, and will be hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Not only will the event provide a valuable insight into the very latest HPC thinking, it will also be a great opportunity to network with all relevant European HPC stakeholders, from technology suppliers and HPC infrastructures to HPC scientific and industrial users in Europe.
The programme starts on Monday with the European Extreme Data and Computing Initiative’s workshop. This is designed to provide an overview of EXDCI’s recent activities including the HPC vision and recommendations to improve the overall HPC ecosystem.
At the heart of the programme will be PRACEdays17, the fourth edition of the PRACE Scientific and Industrial Conference, taking place from Tuesday morning until midday Thursday.
Keynote speakers will bring the event together with a wide range of topics. Minna Palmroth will be introducing Vlasiator, a newly developed space physics model that will model the entirety of near-Earth space with groundbreaking resolution. Alberto Giacomello will be describing his simulations of superhydrophobic surfaces inspired by the remarkable properties of the leaves of the water fern Salvinia molesta. These researchers and others promise to make the event a fascinating couple of days of science at its very peak for all involved.
PRACEdays17 is also bringing an industrial focus to supercomputing and the huge possibilities the organisation offers industry to speed up its innovation cycle using its facilities. Under the banner: HPC for Innovation: When Science meets Industry, the two-day interactive conference will bring several high-level international keynote speakers to Barcelona and delegates will be able to interact in both industrial and scientific activities through parallel sessions and a panel discussion.
PRACEdays17 is very much an international affair, with renowned Chinese speaker Xue-Feng Yuan delivering a keynote address focused on Innovation of Intelligent Manufacturing Driven by Cloud HPC, taking place on Wednesday at 11.15am.
PRACE will continue to champion women in HPC, with several female speakers talking about their work as well as a session devoted to ensuring gender equality in HPC. How to recruit and retain women in the PRACE HPC community is a dedicated session that takes place on Wednesday at 6.50pm.
Prof Dr Frauke Gr?ter, of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and University of Heidelberg, Germany and the winner of the PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC, will also be speaking. The second winner of the PRACE award for a female scientist for an outstanding impact on HPC research, will receive her award of ˆ1000 and a trophy at the award ceremony on the final day of the conference.
She will also participate in the final discussion panel focused on “Support to HPC code: The gap between scientific code development and exascale technology. The software challenges for extreme scale computing faced by the community”.
Another important event during PRACEdays17 will be the signing of a memorandum of understanding between PRACE and RIST of Japan and the US XSEDE. Both organisations are committed to ongoing cooperation with PRACE and will continue to issue joint calls in the months and years to come. Once again, the tie reinforces PRACE’s international credentials.
