Europe's supercomputers are open for business

Researchers can submit projects for approval to run on multi-petaflop platforms

A pan-European multi-petaflop-scale supercomputing initiative, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), was officially opened for business yesterday.

The plan is to make new and existing high-performance computing facilities available to researchers in all 20 participating countries so they can crack knotty problems such as climate modelling, protein folding, pharmaceutical development and advanced engineering projects for renewable energy resources.

Europe's fastest computer and fourth fastest in the world, IBM-based Jugene in Germany, will be the first available to European scientists under the PRACE initiative, although it is offline until the end of this month while it is expanded. By 2015 more supercomputers in Germany, France, Italy and Spain will come on line.

“Scientific computing is a key driver for the development of modern science and technology and for addressing the major challenges of our time like climate change, energy saving and the ageing population," said Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda at the ceremony in Barcelona.

The Commission has stumped up €70m towards PRACE. The supercomputer initiative's aim of promoting European R&D fits closely with the Commission's Digital Agenda for Europe, a key part of the Europe 2020 strategy which seeks to extract the EU from the more of financial crisis by making the EU more competitive in highly skilled areas such as technology.

France, Italy, Germany and Spain will each contribute €100m to PRACE over the next five years. Lesser contributions have come from Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Port ugal, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK. Norway is expected to throw in its lot later this month.

It is expected the first research projects to use the supercomputing capabilities will run in August. Any researchers submit their projects for approval by PRACE.

An early call for submissions to Jugene under the PRACE flag was issued in May. The submission deadline is 16.00 CEST today.