The HPC–Europa Project
The HPC-Europa project is an EUfunded project
within the 6th Framework Programme (FP6) with the
focus on providing HPC services to the European research
community in an innovative and coherent manner. HPC-Europa
consists of several interrelated subprojects, at the
core of which lies the transnational access visitor
programme (TNA), accompanied by several networking
and research activities.
Figure 1: Aeroelastic analysis of helicopter rotor
blades using HPC Aero- and Gasdynamics, University
of Stuttgart
The consortium of HPC-Europa consists of eleven leading
centers working on the three parts of the project:
Transnational Access (TNA), Networking Activities
(NA) and Joint Research Activities (JRA).
While the first and biggest part, TNA, is the visitor
programme, the other two parts go hand in hand with
this activity by developing new solutions for the
AccessGrid video-conferencing toolset (NA), a seamless
integration of performance measurement tools into
the development chain on up-to-date HPC machines (JRA1)
and single-point of access to HPC-facilities (JRA2).
Transnational Access Visitor Programme
Within TNA, which builds on the successful TRACS,
MINOS and ACCESS programs, around 800 scientists from
European and other countries (see table1) may visit
one of the affiliated universities using the HPC-resources
of the six partner HPC-centers. Although the focus
is mainly on high-performance computing, researchers
from all scientific areas are encouraged to apply.
The bjectives of HPC-Europa are to spark a fruitful
collaboration of scientists from different subject
areas in different countries and to increase the usage
of HPC in areas not yet taking advantage of the capabilities
of these computing resources.
Eligible countries are all EU-member countries plus
Liechtenstein, Bulgaria, Norway, Iceland, Romania,
Israel, Switerland, Turkey.
It is envisaged hosting around 140 guest scientists
at HLRS during the four year project period from 2004
until 2007. Of course, other universities in Southern
Germany who are interested in hosting a guest are
welcome to participate as well.
At the University of Stuttgart and the Max-Planck-Institute,
currently 20 institutes are offering their experience
with HPC and computational science to integrate guests
into their working groups. All through their stay,
guests will be supported by HLRS staff in case of
problems. HPC-Europa funds the travel-costs, lodging,
a daily allowance, as well as the compute costs for
stays ranging from two to twelve weeks duration.
As accommodation, a single-room apartment at the University’s
guest-house is offered, which is an ideal location,
at the heart of the campus in Vaihingen.
Networking and Joint Research Activities
Collaboration Support Infrastructure
and Tools in AccessGrid
Support is provided for the collaboration of European
scientists through the usage of the AccessGrid technology,
thereby allowing scientists to do distributed work
on AccessGrid-enabled tools. The applications to be
used and ported into AccessGrid will be HLRS’
Covise collaborative visualization tool and CEPBA’s
Paraver performance analysis tool.
Figure 2: Paraver trace with 16 processors
Data Management and Portability
Another activity is the management of complex scientific
data in heterogeneous distributed computing environments.
This problem will be addressed with a focus on tools
and standards for efficient, reliable and transparent
transfer of data between different platforms, browsing
within the data and promoting best practices within
the user community.
Performance Analysis Tools
This part aims at developing tools and methodologies
that will help operators and users to better measure
and understand the performance behaviour of their
applications, to allow them to make effective use
of HPC-Europa´s infrastructure. The first objective
is therefore to deliver uniform tools across all sites
for advanced performance analysis. These tools, based
on CEPBA’s Paraver technology, will be ported
within the frame of the project on all existing and
future platforms. One example is the NEC-SX system
at HLRS. Another activity will be fitting HRLS’
PACX-MPI library with tracing and performance introspection
capabilities.
Single Point of Access
A single point of access is developed for all centers,
so that they can be used in a transparent way, regardless
of the physical location of users and resources. This
will be achieved by introducing two stages into the
project: at first, existing solutions will be developed
on a small subset of the computer center’s resources,
and later these will be integrated into a common access
portal. Close relationships will be established with
existing activities such as the Polish Progress Portal,
the GridLab portal, GRASP, the UK eScience portal
projects, Unicore, and the Global Grid Forum.
Figure 3 : Partners
Further information: http://www.hpc-europa.org
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