Launched in March 2018, the EXDCI2 project builds upon the success of the first phase of the project and will continue to coordinate the high-performance computing (HPC) ecosystem with additional funding of €2.4M. One of its first activities was to organize the European HPC Summit Week 2018 (EHPCSW18) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. This was the third edition of the conference series and attracted nearly 350 attendees, as well as hosted 11 workshops from HPC initiatives, nine keynote talks and three hands-on training workshops for students.
The third edition of the European HPC Summit Week took place from 28 May to 1 June in Ljubljana, Slovenia and was held at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. It brought together nearly 350 attendees including a wide variety of European HPC stakeholders, covering an extensive range of application areas such as energy, big data, life sciences, engineering, multiscale computing and simulations, and many others. This year the programme also incorporated hands-on training for students. This five-day summit represented a great opportunity to network with all relevant HPC stakeholders across Europe, from technology suppliers and HPC infrastructures to scientific and industrial HPC users.
“We are happy to see that the third edition of this conference series once again brought together a variety of HPC initiatives such as EUDAT, EOSC Pilot, and EaP Connect, among many others,” says Serge Bogaerts, EXDCI coordinator and PRACE Managing Director.
The event kicked off on Monday 28 May with the EXDCI workshop. For this year’s edition, the event had a new structure: every morning featured a plenary session for all EHPCSW18 attendees, while the afternoons had parallel scientific sessions and workshops. With the second phase of the EXDCI project (EXDCI2) launched in March 2018, the workshop provided an overview of the most recent and upcoming EXDCI activities including the HPC vision and recommendations to improve the overall HPC ecosystem so that participants could better understand the status of this increasingly developing ecosystem.
On Tuesday morning, after the opening of EHPCSW and PRACEdays18, two keynote talks took place, covering topics such as Cloud HPC and Containers Supporting Science and Engineering; the PRACE Scientific Case for HPC; the European HPC Strategy and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and Memory Driven Computing, among others.
In the afternoon, parallel workshops were held throughout the week in the framework of PRACEdays18, in addition to workshops organized by other HPC initiatives such as ETP4HPC, EuroLab4HPC, Centres of Excellence (CoEs) and FETHPC projects. The topics of these workshops covered all HPC-related topics, from architecture to applications, and gave an overview of the latest developments on the road to Exascale. The event finished with a lively discussion panel titled “CoEs and HLSTs, what problems can they solve for me?” and the PRACE Award ceremony.
Fourth edition of the European HPC Summit Week
Finally the location of the fourth edition of the European HPC Summit Week 2019 was announced It will take place from 13 to 17 May in Poznan, Poland. Please save the date and stay tuned following the hashtag #EHPCSW or the @EXDCI_EU account on Twitter!
About the EHPCSW conference series
EXDCI coordinates the “European HPC Summit Week” conference series, which intends to bring together the main European HPC stakeholders (institutions, communities, service providers, users, consultants and vendors) during a single week in order to foster cultivate synergies. Each year, EXDCI opens a call for contributions to all HPC-related actors who would like to participate in the week through a workshop.
The first edition, which took place in 2016 (EHPCSW16) in Prague, Czech Republic, attracted a total of 238 attendees with nearly all European nationalities represented. The second edition, which took place in 2017 (EHPCSW17) in Barcelona, Spain, brought together a total of 357 attendees, a success reflecting the growing demand of the ecosystem to gather and exchange on HPC latest developments. Nearly all European nationalities were represented. More information on www.exdci.eu
