(upbeat music)
>> We're back at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas
winding down day four of this conference.
I'm Paul Gillan, my co-host Dave Nicholson.
We are talking,
we've been talking Supercomputing all week,
and you hear a lot about what's going on
in the United States, what's going on in China, Japan.
What we haven't talked a lot about is
what's going on in Europe,
and did you know that two of the top five supercomputers
in the world are actually from European countries?
Well, our guest has a lot to do with that.
Florian Berberich, I hope I pronounce that correctly,
German is not my strength,
is the operations director for PRACE AISBL,
and let's start with that.
What is PRACE?
>> So, hello, and thank you for the invitation.
I'm Florian and PRACE is a partnership
for advanced computing in Europe.
It's a non-profit association
with the seat in Brussels in Belgium,
and we have 24 members, these are representatives
from different European countries
dealing with high performance computing at their place.
We, so far, provided the resources
for our European research communities.
But this changed in the last year
this EuroHPC Joint Undertaking who put a lot of funding
in high performance computing and co-funded
five petascale and three pre-exascale systems,
and two of the pre-exascale systems you mentioned already.
This is Lumi and Finland and Leonardo in Bologna in Italy,
who are in the place four,
three and four of the top 500 list.
>> So why is it important that Europe be
in the top list of supercomputer makers?
>> I think Europe needs to keep pace
with the rest of the world,
and simulation science is a key technology for the society,
and we saw this very recently with the pandemic, with COVID.
We were able to help the research communities
to find very quickly vaccines
and to understand how the virus spread around the world,
and all this knowledge is important to serve the society,
or another example is climate change.
With these new systems, we will be able
to predict more precise changes in the future.
So the more compute power you have,
the better, the smaller the grid,
and there is resolution you can choose,
and the lower the error will be for the future.
So these are, I think, with these systems,
the big challenges we face can be addressed.
This is the climate change, energy, food supply, security.
>> Who are your members?
Do they come from businesses?
Do they come from research? >> No.
>> Government, all of the above?
>> Our members are public organization,
universities, research centers,
compute sites, as data centers,
but public institutions, yeah.
And we provide these services for free
via peer review process,
with excellence as the most important criteria
to the research community, for free.
>> So 40 years ago when,
when the idea of an EU,
and maybe I'm getting the dates a little bit wrong,
when it was just an idea, and the idea of a common currency.
>> Yes. >> Reducing friction between
borders to create a trading zone.
>> Yes.
>> There was a lot of focus there.
Fast forward to today, would you say that
these efforts in supercomputing, would they be possible
if there were not an EU superstructure?
>> No, I would say this would not be possible in this extent.
I think when,
though European initiatives are needed
and the European Commission is supporting
these initiatives very well,
and before PRACE, for instance,
2008, there were research centers and data centers
operating high performance computing systems,
but they were not talking to each other,
so it was isolated.
PRACE created a community of these operation sites
and it facilitated the exchange between them
and also enabled to align investments
and to get the most out of the available funding.
And also, at this time, and still today,
for one single country in Europe,
it's very hard to provide all the different
architectures needed for all the different kind
of research communities and applications
if you want to offer always the latest technologies,
though this is really hardly possible.
So with this joint action and opening the resources
for other research groups from other countries, you,
we were able to get access to the latest technology
for different communities at any given time, though.
>> So the fact that the two systems that you
mentioned are physically located in Finland and in Italy
if you were to walk into one of those facilities
and meet the people that are there,
they're not just Fins in Finland and Italians in Italy.
>> Yeah.
>> This is very much a European effort.
>> This is true.
>> So in this, in that sense,
the geography is sort of abstracted.
>> Yeah. >> And the issues
of sovereignty that make might take place
in the private sector don't exist,
or are there issues with, can any,
what are the requirements for a researcher to have access
to a system in Finland versus a system in Italy?
If you've got a EU passport, are you good to go?
>> I think you are good to go, though,
but EU passport, now it becomes complicated and political.
It's very much, if we talk about the recent systems,
well first, let me start on PRACE.
PRACE was inclusive and there was no any constraints
as even we had users from US, Australia,
we wanted just to support excellence in science,
and we did not look at the nationality of the organization
of the PI and and so on.
There were quotas, but these quotas
were very generously interpreted.
So, now with EuroHPC Joint Undertaking,
it's a question from what European funds
these systems were procured,
and if a country, a European country,
associated to this funding,
the researchers also have access to these systems.
And this addresses basically UK and Switzerland,
which are not
in the European Union,
but they were associated to
the Horizon 2020 research framework.
And though they can access the systems now available,
Lumi, and Leonardo, and the petascale system as well.
How this will develop in the future, I don't know.
It depends to which research framework
they will be associated or not.
>> What are the outputs of your work at PRACE?
Are they reference designs?
Is it actual semiconductor hardware?
Is it research? What do you produce?
>> So the application we run,
or the simulation we run,
cover all different scientific domains.
So it's science,
but also we have industrial lead projects
with more application oriented targets.
Aerodynamics, for instance,
for cars or planes or something like this.
But also fundamental science like the
physical elementary physics particles,
for instance, or climate change, biology,
drug design, protein crystallography, all these things.
>> Can businesses be involved in what you do?
Can they purchase your research?
Do they contribute to their,
I'm sure there are many technology firms
in Europe that would like to be involved.
>> So this involving industry, though our calls are open,
and if they want to do open R&D,
they are invited to submit all their proposals.
They will be evaluated and if this is qualifying
they will get the access
and they can do their jobs and simulations.
It's a little bit more tricky if it's in production,
if they use these resources for their business
and do not publish the results,
They are some,
probably more sites
who are able to deal with these requests.
Some are more dominant than others,
but this is on a smaller scale.
Definitely. Yeah.
>> What does the future hold?
Are you planning to, are there other countries
who will be joining the effort, other institutions?
Do you plan to expand your scope?
>> Well, I think EuroHPC Joint Undertaking
with 36 member states is quite (laughs)
covers already even more than Europe.
And yeah, clearly if there are other states
interested to join that there is no limitation.
Although the focus lies on the European area and union.
>> When you interact with colleagues from North America,
do you feel that there is a sort of a European flavor
to supercomputing that is different or are we
so globally entwined? >> No.
No. So research is not national.
It's not European, it's international.
This is also clearly very clear.
We have a longstanding collaboration with our US colleagues,
and also with Japan, and South Africa, and Canada.
And when COVID hit the world,
we were able within two weeks to establish regular seminars,
inviting US and European colleagues to talk to other,
to each other, and exchange the results
and find new collaboration
and to boost the research activities.
So, and I have other examples as well.
So when we already did the joint calls,
US Exceed, and in Europe PRACE,
it was a very interesting experience.
So we received applications from different communities
and we decided that we will review this on our side,
on European, with European experts and US did it
in US with their experts.
And you can guess what the result was at the meeting when
we compared our results, it was matching one by one.
It was exactly the same result.
>> It's refreshing to hear a story of global collaboration.
>> Yeah. >> Where people are
getting along and making meaningful progress.
>> I have to mention you, I have to to point out,
you did not mention China as a country
you were collaborating with. >> Yes.
>> Is that by, is that intentional?
>> Well, with China definitely we have less links
and collaborations also.
It's also existing.
There was initiative to look at the development
of the technologies and the group meet on a regular basis.
And there were also Chinese colleagues involved.
It's on a lower level, yes.
>> But is, the conversations are occurring.
We're out of time.
Florian Berberich, operations director of PRACE,
European Supercomputing collaborative,
thank you so much for being with us.
I'm always impressed when people come
on theCUBE and submit to an interview
in a language that is not their first language.
>> Yeah, absolutely. >> So brave to do that.
Thank you. >> You're welcome. Thank you.
We'll be right back after this break
from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas.
(peaceful music)