PRACE

The mission of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) is to enable high impact scientific discovery and engineering research and development across all disciplines to enhance European competitiveness for the benefit of society. PRACE seeks to realize this mission by offering world class computing and data management resources and services through a peer review process. PRACE also seeks to strengthen the European users of HPC in industry through various initiatives. PRACE has a strong interest in improving energy efficiency of computing systems and reducing their environmental impact.

PRACE is established as an international not-for-profit association (aisbl) with its head office in Brussels. It has 27 member countries whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.
The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 5 PRACE members. HLRS is providing access to its Tier-0 system Hazel Hen under the umbrella of the German Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. In pace with the needs of the scientific communities and technical developments, systems deployed by PRACE are continuously updated and upgraded to be at the apex of HPC technology.

While PRACE is firmly committed to the continuous improvement of the already deployed services, the PRACE-5IP and PRACE-6IP projects focus on the consolidation of the infrastructure as the reference for HPC in Europe with the following objectives:

• Achieve long-term sustainability of the infrastructure
• Promote Europe’s leadership position in HPC applications
• Build up European human resources skilled in HPC and HPC applications
• Enable a balanced eco-system of HPC resources for Europe’s researchers
• Evaluate new technologies and define Europe’s path for using ExaFlop/s resources