Birds of a Feather Archive

European HPC Ecosystem Summit

Authors: Oriol Pineda (Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE)), Florian Berberich (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE)), Bastian Koller (High Performance Computing Center (HLRS), Stuttgart)

Abstract: PRACE engaged in 2018 in the coordination of European HPC activities, including access to HPC systems, user support, training , policy, technology, operations and dissemination. The initiative led to the development of the "HPC in Europe" portal, a mechanism to structure and present European HPC services.

Since then, the European HPC strategy has undergone strong changes, with the entry of EuroHPC JU and new coordination actors. The objective of this BoF is to present the current status of the ecosystem, discuss further exploitation of the HPC portal, and include the user experience from the Castiel/EuroCC network of European Competence Centres.

Long Description: Answering the policies of the European Comission ('High Performance Computing: Europe's place in a Global Race', followed by 'European Cloud Initiative - Building a competitive data and knowledge economy in Europe'), the European HPC stakeholders engaged a couple of years ago in the coordination of their HPC services and activities, with the objective to set the role and responsibilities of each major European HPC actor with regards to Access to HPC systems, HPC user support, Training in HPC, HPC policy, HPC technology development, HPC operations and dissemination.

To this end, a working group led by PRACE organised a series of networking events and distributed a self-evaluation survey to more than 80 institutions, in order to identify their services and competences in HPC. This led to the first complete structure of European HPC services, presented and discussed in the SC19 BoF entitled "European HPC Ecosystem Summit". Afterwards, this has been periodically updated and promoted in the EuroHPC Summit Week editions, and notably in the online SC20 BoF that received 565 remote participants, the most successful BoF attendance after TOP500 BoF that year. Since then, the ecosystem has evolved significantly, and also the needs for coordination. To this end, PRACE has been periodically interacting with the newcomers and organising coordination events.

The living conclusions of this working group led to the deployment in 2020 of the HPC in Europe services portal (www.hpc-portal.eu), as the mechanism to structure the European HPC services and documentation. Over the past two years, this portal has been adopted by the European coordination actions (PRACE, Castiel/EuroCC network of national competence centres, FocusCoE network of Centres of Excellence) to manage and coordinate most of the European offer in HPC training. This has proven the success of the whole initiative, of the analysis undertaken, and of the new services portal itself, more specifically the ability to provide real-time taylored extracts for community, domain or country usage.

The objective of this BoF is to present the exploitation plan for the second phase of the HPC portal, based on the activities and needs of the HPC communities, prepared between PRACE and Castiel/EuroCC, and to open a discussion to further refine and optimise this plan. The BoF will be key to engage further HPC communities to participate in this portal, notably the Centres of Excellence in HPC and also EuroHPC Joint Undertaking as the major promoter of this second phase. After the so-considered test period, it is now the ideal timing to expand the investment and exploitation of the HPC in Europe portal, in order to effectively include the complete catalogue of European HPC services, also based on the new resources and services made available by EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

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