GASC followup: international is the key

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As promised yesterday, I did manage to follow up with Jay Boisseau at TACC on some of the motivations behind the new Global Academic Supercomputing Consortium (GASC). There are lots of HPC groups…why create another one?

The secret sauce is indeed the group’s international flavor.

GASC is intended to be a forum to reduce the research regionalization that happens as a natural consequence of the fact that the majority of us tend to meet and work most often with others in our region or country. By bringing together a few centers with a deep commitment to partnerships and building relationships from each of the major regions of the world doing supercomputing, GASC hopes to provide a forum in which best practices in HPC and new technologies can more easily move around the globe.

The inspiration for the group arose from Jay’s experience on mailing lists where he would hear from international members about new tools and technologies that it might take him months to read about in journals or see at SC.

A secondary goal for the group is to build a ready framework for international collaboration in HPC that reflects the growing trend in multi-national projects like ITER and the International Space Station.