CSC: Hosting entities of the EuroHPC supercomputers join efforts in new project to support HPC users

Over the last few years, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has been working towards taking European supercomputing to new historic heights by installing new machines capable of competing with their global counterparts: three pre-exascale, five petascale and two future exascale supercomputers. Now, the current and future hosts of said supercomputers have combined forces to provide support services to selected users. The result is the EPICURE project (High-level specialised application support service in High-Performance Computing), featuring 16 partners and led by CSC – IT Center for Science. 

Until now, the support provided was mainly focused on helpdesk support and resolution of operational issues. "At the moment, most of the help provided to users is short-term support which requires basic HPC skills and competences" says Emmanuel Ory, Development Manager at CSC - IT Center for Science and Coordinator of the project. "EPICURE will be ready to help users at an advanced technical level. Right now, all the different sites in Europe use different architectures, so users need to be able to move from one system to another very easily and seamlessly", Ory continues.

The project will provide several services, including code enablement and scaling, performance analysis and benchmarking, code refactoring and code optimisation. To this end, the project will draw on the experience and knowledge of all partners in HPC operations and support, using training activities and hackathons to share knowledge in porting, optimisation, parallelisation, and GPU programming. EPICURE will also include close collaboration with the different Competence Centres and Centres of Excellence.

CSC – IT Center for Science (Finland) is the Coordinator of the consortium which includes 16 partners from 14 different countries:  Barcelona Supercomputing Centre - Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion (Spain), Cineca Consorzio Unteruniversitario (Italy), VSB - Technical University of Ostrava (Czechia), Institut Informacijskih Znanosti (Slovenia), Luxprovide SA (Luxembourg), INESC TEC - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Tecnologia e Ciência (Portugal), Sofia Tech Park JSC (Bulgaria), Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium), Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan (Sweden), Akademia Gorniczo-Hutnicza IM. Stanislawa Staszica W Krakowie (Poland), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (Denmark), Forschungszentrum Julich Gmbh (Germany), Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif (France). Also joining EPICURE project are Institut Jozef Stefan (Slovenia) and Centre Informatique National de L'Enseignement Superieur (France) as affiliated entities. 

This article was first published on 18 March by CSC – IT Center for Science.