PRACE in a few words

The mission of the PRACE RI is to enable high impact European scientific discovery and engineering research and development across all disciplines to enhance European competitiveness for the benefit of society. The PRACE RI seeks to realize this mission through world class computing and data management resources and services open to all European public research through a peer review process. Through the broad participation of European governments through representative organizations a diversity of resources can be provided by the PRACE RI including expertise throughout Europe in effective use of the resources. To aid users and potential users as well as preparing the next generation scientists and engineers PRACE has an extensive pan-European education and training effort. PRACE also encourages collaboration with industry and industrial use and conducts annual Industrial Seminars at locations throughout Europe. PRACE also seeks to strengthen the European HPC industry through various initiatives and has a strong interest in improving energy efficiency of computing systems and reducing their environmental impact.

The PRACE RI is established as an international non-profit association with seat in Brussels and is named ‘Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe AISBL’. It has 24 member countries whose representative organizations are creating a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.

The PRACE RI offers three different forms of access: Project Access, Programme Access and Preparatory Access. Project Access is the normal form of access for individual researchers and research groups. It is open to European researchers and their collaborators from recognized European academic institutions and industry for projects deemed to have significant European and International impact. Calls for Proposals are issued twice a year and are evaluated by leading scientists and engineers in a peer-review process governed by a PRACE Scientific Steering Committee comprised of leading European researchers from a broad range of disciplines. Programme Access is available to major European projects or infrastructures that can benefit from PRACE resources and for which Project Access is not appropriate. Preparatory Access is a simplified form of access for limited resources for the preparation of resource requests in response to Project Access Calls for Proposals.

PRACE has an extensive education and training effort for effective use of the RI through seasonal schools, workshops and scientific and industrial seminars throughout Europe. Seasonal Schools target broad HPC audiences, whereas workshops are focused on particular technologies, tools or disciplines or research areas. Education and training material and documents related to the RI are available on the PRACE website as is schedule of events.

PRACE undertakes software and hardware technology initiatives with the goal of preparing for changes in technologies used in the RI and provide the proper tools, education and training for the user communities to adapt to those changes. A goal of these initiatives is also to reduce the life-time cost of systems and their operations, in particular the energy consumption of systems and the environmental impact. To reduce potential conflict of interest in vendor collaborations PRACE initiated the formation of STRATOS (STRAtegic TechnOlogieS), and organization for collaboration with industry and other non-PRACE partner organizations. The PRACE leadership systems form the apex of resources for large-scale computing and data management for scientific discovery, engineering research and development for the benefit of Europe and are well integrated into the European HPC ecosystem. PRACE is funded by member governments through their representative organizations and EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-261557. The first PRACE computer systems and their operations are funded by the governments of the representative organizations hosting the systems.