Thomas Schulthess from CSCS Awarded Doron Prize

“With his precious scientific and technical contribution, Prof. Dr. Thomas Schulthess has laid important foundations for the success of research groups that use the CSCS infrastructure and carry out computational research. For about five years the CSCS has had the best computing performance in Europe and is currently one of the world’s leading centers in this sector: it is with these arguments that the Foundation Board motivates the choice of the winner of the award.”

Piz Daint Supercomputer to Power LHC Computing Grid

The fastest supercomputer in Europe will soon join the WLHC Grid. Housed at CSCS in Switzerland, the Piz Daint supercomputer be used for data analysis from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Until now, the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb particle detectors delivered their data to “Phoenix” system for analysis and comparison with the results of previous simulations.

Swiss HPC Conference to Focus on Intersecting Interests, Industries, and Initiatives

Coming up in April, AI and HPC practitioners share passions for cutting-edge technology and breakthrough R&D in Lugano, Switzerland at the tenth annual Swiss Conference and HPCXXL User Group. The joint sessions take place at Palazzo dei Congressi, April 1-4, bringing leaders together from academia, government and industry to share first-hand insights on innovative research, techniques, tools and technologies that are fueling economies, productivity and progress globally.

New Report: PRACE in the EuroHPC Era

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe has published a new report: PRACE in the EuroHPC Era. PRACE is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. “The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will advance the European supercomputer landscape by completing the infrastructure pyramid at the top level with European leadership-class supercomputers. In a context of a strong international competition with USA, China and Japan, this development is highly expected by all stakeholders of HPC in Europe. For the European HPC users from science and industry, i.e. industrials and SMEs, the seamless integration of these new top-level systems and services into the existing European HPC-ecosystem is an issue of paramount importance.”

An Update on Piz Daint – the Fastest Supercomputer in Europe

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Michele De Lorenzi from CSCS in Switzerland provides an update on Piz Daint, the fastest supercomputer in Europe. “Recently upgraded with two additional cabinets full of NVIDIA V100 GPUs, the Cray XC50 system comes in at #5 in the world with 21.23 Petaflops of performance on the LINPACK benchmark.”

Video: Reflecting on the Goal and Baseline of Exascale Computing

Thomas Schulthess from CSCS gave this talk at the Blue Waters Summit. “Application performance is given much emphasis in discussions of exascale computing. A 50-fold increase in sustained performance over today’s applications running on multi-petaflops supercomputing platforms should be the expected target for exascale systems deployed early next decade. We will reflect on what this means in practice and how much these exascale systems will advance the state of the art.”

Video: CSCS Update for 2018

In this video from PASC18, Thomas Schulthess provides an update on CSCS. “CSCS develops and operates cutting-edge high-performance computing systems as an essential service facility for Swiss researchers. These computing systems are used by scientists for a diverse range of purposes – from high-resolution simulations to the analysis of complex data.”

Video: Introduction to OpenACC

Vasileios Karakasis from CSCS gave this talk at the the Directive Based GPU Programming Workshop. “Directives-based programming facilitates the task of parallelizing your application by letting you focus on its parallel logic rather than on the very details and the low-level intricacies of the GPU architecture. In this course, we will introduce the OpenACC programming paradigms for the GPU. We will cover the parallel execution model and how it can be used to leverage parallelism, the memory model and how this differs from the classic CPU paradigm.”

CSCS Takes on Big Data from the Paul Scherrer Institute

Today CSCS in Lugano announced plans to archive research data collected by the large-scale research facilities at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen. The collaboration between PSI and CSCS enabled major improvements to the data transfer and storage process. “Storing and archiving data is part of everyday life at CSCS. However, transferring huge amounts of data — including ongoing research projects online across Switzerland as well as an entire data archive containing decades of major completed projects — via fibre-optic cable presents a logistical challenge.”

Supercomputing how Fish Save Energy Swimming in Schools

Over at CSCS, Simone Ulmer writes that researchers at ETH Zurich have clarified the previously unresolved question of whether fish save energy by swimming together in schools. They achieved this by simulating the complex physics on the supercomputer ‘Piz Daint’ and combining detailed flow simulations with a reinforcement learning algorithm for the first time. “In their simulations, they have not examined every aspect involved in the efficient swimming behavior of fish. However, it is clear that the developed algorithms and physics learned can be transferred into autonomously swimming or flying robots.”