Community-oriented support and research structures

Abstract

Coordinated by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) Europe is restructuring and strengthening its high-performance computing infrastructure with the aim to create a model HPC ecosystem. At the tip of the pyramid, up to six centres are envisaged that will operate systems of the highest performance class. The HPC Research Infrastructure (HPC-RI) will comprise European, national and regional centres. Science communities are integral partners, strong links will include Grid and Cloud users. The HPC-RI strives at providing scientists all over Europe, on the one hand, with unlimited and independent access to state-of-the-art computer resources in all performance classes and, on the other hand, with a world-class pan-European competence and support network.While the hardware-oriented buildup of the infrastructure is making progress, high-quality user support and software development in the upcoming era of unprecedented parallelism and exascale on the horizon have become the imminent challenges. This has been clearly recognized by the European Commission, who will issue calls for proposals to fund petascale software development in summer 2009. Although traditional support structures are well established in Europe's major supercomputing centres, it is questionable if these structures are able to meet the challenges of the future: in general, support structures are based on cross-disciplinary computer science and mathematics teams; disciplinary computational science support usually is given in an ad-hoc, project-oriented manner.In this paper, we describe our approach to establish a suitable support structure–Simulation Laboratories (SL). SLs are currently being established at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre of the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) of the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) in Germany. While SLs are community-oriented, i.e. each SL focusses on a specific community, they are structured in a strictly interdisciplinary manner, comprising mathematicians, computer scientists and technicians along with disciplinary scientists. SLs are led by a disciplinary scientist, and representatives of the respective disciplines give guidance to its operation. This concept is proposed as a model for and might become an integral element of a future pan-European HPC support and software research structure.