On one hand, robust and reliable hardware is now available, on the other hand application software is largely either not available or not of commercial quality. As long as the major standard codes, relevant for industrial product development, are not available on parallel systems in a well validated form and supported by professional and experienced software vendors, the parallel computing market will stay small. If this happens, the enormous potential offered by distributed-memory parallel computing for industrial research and commercial applications will not be realised. Target platforms will be distributed-memory computers as well as clusters of workstations. Systematic benchmarking will be performed for industrially relevant test cases.
Industrial impact is guaranteed by involving end-users in all benchmarking activities.
Finally, in order to achieve the above primary goal, major emphasis will be put on dissemination of all relevant information. Each Porting Consortium consists of at least a code owner, a parallelisation expert and an end-user. Overall, the partners, reviewers, managers and service providers are distributed across fourteen European countries and over fifty organisations. Twenty-one codes are being ported. External service providers contribute other skills and resources that are not internally available to the individual PCs and the management.