PRACE-2IP

Building a world-class pan-European High Performance Computing (HPC) Service was a highly ambitious undertaking that involved governments, funding agencies, centres capable to host and manage the supercomputers, and the scientific and industrial user communities with leading edge applications. HPC Infrastructure has two unique characteristics: supercomputers serve all scientific disciplines and Tier-0 supercomputers have a three year investment cycle as Tier-0 implies leading edge services. This requires a periodic renewal of the Tier-0 systems and a continuous upgrade of the infrastructure. Furthermore, novel architectures and system designs will be created by the vendors for leadership systems. At any given time there will be between three and five different systems each of them serving a particular application spectrum best. This fact mandated a distributed Research Infrastructure, since no single site can host all the necessary systems because of floor space, power, and cooling demands. PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, had the overall objective to create the prerequisites for such a pan-European HPC service satisfying the objectives mentioned above and to move into the implementation phase as early as end of 2009, beginning of 2010.

As from the mandate of the Italian Ministry of Education University and Research, CINECA represents Italy in PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). CINECA becomes a Tier-0 site as described in the PRACE roadmap.