The DEISA PRACE Symposium 2009 took place from 11-13 May in Amsterdam focusing on HPC infrastructures for Petascale applications. DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, and PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, have merged their annual science symposia for the first time into one European HPC event hosted by SARA and NCF at the Royal Tropical Institute.
Speakers on the first day included Kostas Glinos of the European Commission, Abani Patra from the National Science Foundation (USA), Ryutaro Himeno from RIKEN (Japan), Horst Simon from the Department of Energy (USA), Ben Evans from the Australian National University (Australia) and Vladimir Voevodin from the Moscow State University (Russia).
The symposium also featured speakers from different science communities, including Professor Sylvie Joussaume, researcher at CNRS and expert in climate modelling. In the life science community talk Professor Peter Coveney from University College London presented the Virtual Physiological Human project with collaborations from seven European countries.
Professor Frank Jenko from the European Fusion Research community, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, presented an overview of the worldwide ITER project and the HPC needs for its success.
Professor Carlos Frenk from Durham University gave an insight into the world of cosmology and the challenging simulations of cosmic evolution by the VIRGO Consortium, the world-leading group in this field.
All four science communities are supported by DEISA and plan to use the PRACE Petaflop systems. PRACE also provided its perspectives on HPC architectures, applications, training and education. In addition, from the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative 10 computational science grand challenge projects from all over Europe covering many science areas were presented.
