PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing, was established in April 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 (FR, DE, IT and ES) and since 2016, five European countries (with the addition of CHE) that committed to host leading-edge supercomputers at the highest performance level in Europe. In addition, from March 2017 all PRACE General Partners fund High Level Support Teams at the Hosting Sites in order to support PRACE users. HPC experts from 26 member states - funded in part by the PRACE-IP projects, enable users from academia and industry to ascertain research leadership and remain competitive in the global race. The objectives of PRACE-6IP were to build on and seamlessly continue the achievements of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium such as:
-Provision of Tier-0 service based on excellence and innovation
-Support Tier-0 users and communities with novel software solutions
-Collaboration with Centres of Excellence on HPC applications, and other national and EU funded activities
-Support new user needs, new user communities, and new applications
-Support a functional European HPC Ecosystem
-Provide and develop tailored training and skills development programmes
-A sustainable governance and business model
-Support the strategic development of a rich HPC environment
-Coordination with European Technology Platform for HPC, the Centres of Excellence and EuroHPC JU Research and Innovation Advisory Groups
-International HPC cooperation policy
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 take-up by industry and special offers to SMEs; analysing new flexible business models for PRACE 2 and PRACE 3; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, the new CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies.
PRACE-6IP was coordinated and managed by Forschungszentrum Jülich, had a budget of nearly 30 Mio € including an EC contribution of 24 Mio €. The project lifetime was of 44 months (May 2019 - December 2022).
