D5.1.1: Third PRACE Industrial Seminar
Creators: name: Merida-Campos, Carlos
name: Johnsson, Lennart
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2011
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure
Business cases
SME
Industry

description: The 3rd PRACE Industry Seminar was held in Stockholm on March 28th-29th 2011 with 81 attendees from 22 countries and 39 companies represented. Twenty of the companies were first time attendees and 19 were returning companies. Thirteen companies were from the Nordic region and four from Eastern Europe. The objective of exposing PRACE to companies in the Nordic region was thus successful. The 19 returning companies is a good indicator of the success of previous PRACE industrial seminars and the appeal of the program for this year’s seminar. The objective of seeking information from participating companies for the formulation of PRACE industrial offerings was also successfully met through very interactive plenary sessions and smaller parallel sessions with foci of significant industrial interest and active participation. Thirty-two of 36 company attendees expressed interest in receiving PRACE news and information in the future and 19 companies expressed interest in a follow-up contact from PRACE. The 3rd PRACE Industry Seminar did successfully address HPC issues facing large companies as well as SMEs as evidenced by the responses and the fact that 33 of 36 companies that provided written feedback expressed an interest in participating in the 4th PRACE Industry Seminar planned for 2012.<br> The conference program developed by the program committee with representatives from 14 PRACE partners was intended to appeal to both large European companies and SMEs and address a range of HPC issues, not only Tier-0 issues. The format was designed to stimulate discussion and interaction between PRACE and company representatives as well as between company representatives. To achieve this objective the conference format had plenary talks from both SMEs and large companies, and parallel sessions addressing HPC topics known to be of concern to many companies. For the plenary talks great effort was expended by the program committee to seek company speakers that would address novel usage of HPC and focus on the science, engineering, computational and commercial challenges in their presentations.<br> The conference venue was the new Stockholm Waterfront Congress Center that opened in January 2011 and is located next to Stockholm’s major transportation hub and Lake Mälaren in the centre of Stockholm. The venue was chosen for its ease of access and for being one of the worlds most environmentally friendly congress centres fully in line with Stockholm’s award by the EU Commission as the 2010 Green Capital (the first such award made), and for offering state-of-the-art technology. A conference dinner was held at the Vasa Museum, a museum erected around the 1628 Swedish worship that was salvaged 50 years ago. PDC – the High-Performance Computing Centre at KTH served as the local organizer.<br> The seminar was conducted on a two half days format. Monday March 28th the seminar was opened by Prof. Lennart Johnsson (PDC Director, KTH) followed by a welcome speech by Prof. Gunnar Landgren (Advisor to the KTH President and the Director of the Swedish node of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s (EIT’s) ICT lab). Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem (Chair of the PRACE AISBL Council) gave an overview of PRACE’s vision and PRACE approach to collaboration with industry to strengthen European competitiveness. This was followed by a presentation by Dr. Bernhard Fabianek (Program Officer, EC HPC Unit) on the critical role the EC sees HPC playing for European competitiveness in research as well as commerce and the important role PRACE.is playing in this regard.<br> Four representatives from European innovative SMEs gave presentations on the usage of HPC in their respective sectors. The companies were: Euro-CFD (computational fluids dynamics (CFD) in the automotive domain), HMI (business intelligence), Rila Solutions (software services) and Vratis (GPU-based software libraries for HPC).<br> Cenaero, the first company to be granted access to PRACE resources as part of the newly formed PRACE Industry Pilot program for open research carried out by companies with need for access to high-end HPC resources, presented their current developments in CFD and their medium term objectives and the significant role PRACE has in aiding their success.<br> The first day was concluded with a presentation of the PRACE Research Infrastructure by Dr. Sergi Girona (Chair of the PRACE Board of Directors) and detailed presentations from two leaders of the PRACE 1IP work packages addressing software petascaling and future HPC technology prototypes and assessment.<br> On Tuesday March 29th the seminar continued with presentations from two Nordic companies with unique products: Vestas, a world leading wind turbine and energy park planning company and Efield, a small company with unique software for electromagnetic field calculations.<br> These presentations were followed by three parallel sessions for in-depth discussions of companies needs and expectations on key HPC related issues. The topics were:<br> - HPC access for SMEs<br> - Porting applications to new architectures<br> - Relationships with ISVs and open source communities<br> After this session, two global large enterprises, Schlumberger and ABB, presented their experiences and challenges in the usage of HPC. This session was followed by “PRACE: What’s Next?” a session in which the Prospect and PRACE joint initiative towards the creation of a European Technology Platform on HPC was presented.<br> Before closing the seminar, a wrap-up session was organised with the moderators of the parallel sessions highlighting the main conclusions of their sessions.<br> In all, 94 companies have participated in at least one PRACE Industry Seminar. The 3rd PRACE Industry Seminar had a significant presence of Nordic Companies and also companies from Eastern European Countries an objective with locating the seminar in the Nordic region. Representatives from two potential new member countries of PRACE also participated.