EuroCC and CASTIEL Begin Second Funding Phase

The High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart, one of three German national supercomputing centers within the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, will continue to coordinate EuroCC and CASTIEL. HLRS is also leading or participating in four newly announced EuroHPC JU Centres of Excellence.

EuroHPC JU Executive Director Anders Dam Jensen welcomed the renewals of EuroCC and CASTIEL, saying, “EuroCC and CASTIEL were two of the first EuroHPC projects to get off the ground. The work of these two projects underpins the mission of the EuroHPC JU by supporting European HPC users and the development of a consistent skills base across Europe. I am very pleased to see these projects continue into their second phase and further the great work they are doing to strengthen our European HPC ecosystem." 

In its first funding period, EuroCC coordinated the establishment of national competence centers (NCCs) for high-performance computing and related technologies in 33 countries. Each NCC performed a thorough review of HPC resources and expertise in its home country, and has served as a central contact point for HPC users and system operators who have questions concerning high-performance computing, high-performance data analytics, or artificial intelligence.

Simultaneously, CASTIEL has enhanced the impact of EuroCC by implementing common standards and facilitating international collaboration and knowledge exchange across the NCC network. These efforts are helping to raise the quality of HPC services continent-wide, including regions where usage of high-performance computing has been slower to develop. CASTIEL has supported numerous training, mentoring, twinning, and workshop activities, and through a web portal called EuroCC Access has created a gateway for representatives of industry, public administration, and academia to find relevant HPC expertise and resources in their home countries.

A kickoff meeting will take place at the Filderhalle in Leinfelden-Echterdingen on February 7-9. Representatives from across the NCC network will meet to begin working on new collaborative efforts that will help shape the development of European science and technology in the coming years.

Stronger together

To date, EuroCC and CASTIEL have helped kick off international training collaborations among NCCs that focused on key topics for programming and operating high-performance computing systems. They have also gathered and shared best practices in activities that are important for HPC center management, including project management, data management, and information security. In September, EuroCC also organized a four-day conference in Montenegro that enabled a more intensive exchange of insights and experiences, leading to many new collaborative initiatives across the network and beyond.

One high priority of EuroCC and CASTIEL has been to enhance the NCCs’ ability to support European industry, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This has meant developing understanding of best practices for addressing the unique interests and needs of industrial HPC users. The EuroCC network has also been supporting a third EU-funded project called FF4EuroHPC (also coordinated by HLRS), which awards pilot projects (business experiments) to SMEs interested in testing new applications of simulation, data analytics, or artificial intelligence to improve their business capabilities. The NCCs supported the applications for such pilot projects in their respective countries and in several cases members of the NCCs are supporting the execution of the experiments. These efforts have resulted in success stories that the NCCs can use in outreach to companies in their regions, demonstrating how high-performance computing could help them to develop better products and services.

“During the first funding period of EuroCC and CASTIEL, it quickly became clear that the HPC communities in different countries — at all levels of expertise — have much to gain by discussing their knowledge, experiences, and needs with others, and we were excited to see the enthusiasm for collaboration,” said Dr.-Ing. Bastian Koller, HLRS’s General Manager and the Project Coordinator of EuroCC and CASTIEL. “As these projects enter their second phase, these interactions will lead to further improvements and impressive success stories in the usage of HPC, HPDA, and AI for research and industrial applications across Europe.”

HLRS will lead Centres of Excellence for HPC Applications

In addition to leading EuroCC and CASTIEL, HLRS is a scientific partner in four new EuroHPC JU Centres of Excellence for HPC Applications (CoEs). In contrast to the NCCs of EuroCC, which bundle competences on a regional level, the CoEs gather expertise by sector (such as engineering or biology). Based on collaboration among leading HPC centers, the CoEs will conduct critical research necessary to adapt important computing codes for future exascale systems. Doing so will make it possible to utilize the power of those systems more efficiently, and to answer increasingly complex questions more quickly. HLRS will be involved in the following CoEs:

EXCELLERAT P2 – HLRS will continue as the coordinating center for the second phase of this project, which is scaling important codes for high-tech engineering to larger computing architectures and supporting the technology transfer that will enable their uptake in industry.

HiDALGO2 – HLRS technically manages this project to develop novel methods, algorithms, and software for HPC and HPDA, focusing on systems science applications to address major global challenges.

ChEESE-2P – ChEESE has been developing European flagship codes for upcoming pre-exascale and exascale supercomputing systems, focusing on Earth science fields relevant for the prediction and management of risks associated with earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes.

CEEC – CEEC is a new Center of Excellence that will develop key codes for computational fluid dynamics in preparation for the arrival of exascale supercomputing systems.

From 2018 to 2022, HLRS was involved in FocusCoE, a project that coordinated the strategic collaboration and outreach among the EU-funded Centres of Excellence. This role has now been integrated into CASTIEL 2. Doing so will help to ensure that awareness of the technical achievements of the CoEs is disseminated Europe-wide and that collaboration between CoEs and NCCs happens in a more direct way, increasing their application within research and industry. CASTIEL 2 will also support the release of the CoEs' enhanced HPC, AI, and data analytics applications on the next generation of EuroHPC petascale, pre-exascale and exascale supercomputers, leveraging the reach of the EuroCC network to ensure that HPC users across Europe can access and profit from them.

—Christopher Williams