EUROPE: Supercomputer tackles the tough questions

The supercomputer has changed the world we live in. For most people, the big story in computing is that of its shrinking from a machine the size of a house to a chip in a mobile phone. But modern science, technology and medicine still depend on the monsters of the computing world. Supercomputers have transformed most scientific disciplines and created new ones, such as modelling climate, new molecules, quantum mechanics and the simulation of earthquakes. Famously, the daily weather forecast relies on supercomputers. Now European computer scientists have banded together to better manage future projects.

In 1965, Gordon E Moore made his famous, and still accurate, prediction that ordinary computing power would double every two years. But although the first supercomputers of the 1980s were about seven years ahead of standard computers in terms of computing power, that lead has now roughly doubled. Meanwhile, scientific and technological demand has proved more than a match for Moore's Law.

Instead of relying, as the first supercomputers did, on faster processors than their rivals, the modern descendants organise ranks of thousands of processors to perform the calculations in parallel. This parallelism has now been applied to the computers themselves and the new buzzword is megacomputer: a federation of supercomputers linked by a super-fast network.

In 2004, as part of a bid to keep at the forefront of science and technology, the European Union launched the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications or DEISA. DEISA is creating a virtual supercomputing campus for Europe and its underlying multi-gigabit GÉANT2 network connects 34 countries and 30 national research networks. It aims to present a unified interface and services to scientists and engineers, despite the wide variety of the underlying hardware.

Until now, the provision of the computers themselves has been a matter for universities and research bodies. In 2007, a group of research institutions launched PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. With Ireland and Turkey joining in May, the consortium now has 16 members.

PRACE's main task is to make available to scientists throughout Europe, the new generation of petaflop (a thousand million million instructions per second) computers. Its task is made more daunting by the fact that each of these monsters will be obsolete in two to three years.

Professor Achim Bachem, PACE's project coordinator, told a meeting in Paris last month that access to capability computers of leadership class was essential for international competitiveness in science and engineering. Currently, Europe has just under half the supercomputing capacity of the US and just over double that of Asia. Of that capacity, about 75% is now within PRACE.

The partnership plans to consolidate Europe's supply of state-of-the-art computers into three to five centres with a total running cost of up to EUR200 million (US$315 million) a year. Each replacement cycle is expected to cost twice that amount.

chris.chinnery@uw-news.com