PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing, was established in May 2010 as a permanent pan-European High Performance Computing service providing world-class systems for world-class science. Through funding agreements, PRACE secured funding from initially four (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) and most recently five European countries (with the addition of Switzerland) that committed to host leading-edge supercomputers at the highest performance level in Europe. In addition, from March 2017 all general PRACE partners committed to fund High Level Support Teams (HLST) at the Hosting Sites in order to support PRACE users. HPC experts from twenty-five member states - funded in part by the Implementation Projects, enabled users from academia and industry to ascertain leadership and remain competitive in the Global Race. Currently, PRACE is in the transition to PRACE 2, the successor of the initial five-year period.
The objectives of PRACE-4IP wre to build on and seamlessly continued the successes of PRACE and started new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include:
- Achieve long-term sustainability of the infrastructure.
- Promote Europe’s leadership in HPC applications.
- Build up European human resources skilled in HPC and HPC applications.
- Enable a balanced eco-system of HPC resources for Europe’s researchers.
- Evaluate new technologies and define Europe’s path for using ExaFlop/s resources.
- Disseminate effectively the PRACE results.
These activities were designed to increase Europe's research and innovation potential especially through:
- Seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities;
- Promoting use of HPC by industry and special offers to SMEs;
- Analysing new flexible business models for PRACE 2;
- Proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems;
- Collaborating with the ETP4HPC, the coming CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies.
PRACE-4IP was coordinated and managed by Forschungszentrum Juelich. It had a budget of nearly 16,5 Mio € including an EC contribution of 15 Mio €. With the 3rd Contract Amendment signed at the beginning of April 2017, the duration of the project was extended by 8 months reaching in total 35 months.
