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Tasks such as simulating the airflow in a building or designing new protein sequences call for levels of processing power that only supercomputers can provide. Yet using supercomputers can be expensive. More small and medium-sized industrial companies would make use of such power if only access was easier and processing costs less prohibitive.
Two Esprit projects aim to deliver high-performance computing onto the desks of SMEs. The technologies developed in MICA and PHASE - which make use of HPCN, Internet access and Web-based graphical user interfaces - should provide firms with easy access to high-end supercomputers via service centres all over Europe. These projects will offer companies the ability to solve complex processing problems, while requiring payment only for the computing power used. In effect, leased high-performance processing.
The infrastructure developed in MICA offers reasonable-cost access to the power of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software running on high-performance computers. This network, MICANET, is fault-tolerant, dynamic and has already been accepted by end-users. It offers customised virtual reality interfaces, use of the Internet for data transfer and processing centres with powerful computers, CFD-simulation software and expertise. The initial ten application sectors, in industry and construction, are gradually being expanded.
PHASE builds on this work, providing a central access point to powerful computing platforms that run applications used in the pharmaceutical drug development process. The distributed management system developed under both projects is expected to be easily adaptable to other applications and sectors.
The MICA demonstration at EITC shows 3-D virtual reality applications for CFD, using examples such as architectural design and offshore explosions. The demonstration underlines the ease with which end-users can access supercomputers across Europe.
Contact: Alexander REINEFELD, Universität-GH Paderborn (D)
tel +49 52 5160 9290 - fax +49 52 5160 6297 - ar@uni-paderborn.de - www.uni-paderborn.de/pc2/projects/phase/
This document is located at /esprit/src/exhib35.htm
It was last updated on 22 October 1997, and is maintained by the EITC 97 Secretariat - eitc97@dg3.cec.be