Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications

Last updated
Formation2002
PurposeResearch Network
Region served
Europe

Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a consortium of major national supercomputing centres in Europe. Initiated in 2002, it became a European Union funded supercomputer project. The consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on European high-performance computing systems by creating a European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing.

Contents

History

The DEISA project started as DEISA1 in 2002 developing and supporting a pan-European distributed high performance computing infrastructure. The initial project was funded by the European Commission in the sixth of the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development (FP6) from 2004 through 2008. [1] The funding continued for the follow-up project DEISA2 in the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) through 2011. [2] [3]

The DEISA infrastructure coupled eleven national supercomputing centres with a dedicated (mostly 10 Gbit/s) network connection provided by GÉANT2 on the European level and the national research and education networks (NRENs). [4]

DEISA was the first initiative to overcome the fragmentation of supercomputing resources in Europe. Parts of the national supercomputing resources were provided for most challenging computational projects from all over Europe, providing access to the most advanced and most suitable supercomputer architectures available, for positively reviewed projects. Through DECI, the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, not only computing resources, but also advanced application enabling was provided.

Consortium

There were 11 principal partners and four associate partners.

Principal partners were:

Associate partners were:

In 2011 services were taken over by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE). [5]

DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative - DECI

The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) was launched in 2005 to enhance DEISA's impact on science and technology in Europe. DEISA carried out 6 DECI projects until 2010. After the end of DEISA, DECI was continued by PRACE as Tier-1 level services under the name of "Distributed European Computing Initiative", while the new PRACE Tier-0 level services became the leading edge of supercomputing in Europe.

The DEISA TeraGrid Collaboration

DEISA was the European counterpart of the US NSF funded TeraGrid project. [6] In a collaborative effort in 2005, a dedicated trusted network connection was established between DEISA and TeraGrid, to implement a combined global file system spanning two continents. During the Supercomputing Conference 2005, supercomputing applications were carried out both in Europe and in the US with output transparently written to the unified global file system. For details see "Exploring the hyper-grid idea with grand challenge applications: the DEISA-TeraGrid interoperability demonstration". [7]

DEISA Publications

DEISA published a brochure in 2008 and DEISA Digests in 2008, 2010 and 2011.

DEISA Brochure: Advancing Science in Europe (ISBN 978-952-5520-32-3) [8]

DEISA Digest 2008: Benefits of Supercomputing (ISBN 978-952-5520-33-0) [9]

DEISA Digest 2010: Extreme computing in Europe (ISBN 978-952-5520-40-8) [10]

DEISA Digest 2011: Extreme computing in Europe (ISBN 978-952-5520-40-8) [11]

DEISA Benchmark Suite

DEISA produced a benchmark suite to help computer scientists assess the performance of parallel supercomputer systems. The benchmark comprises a number of real applications codes taken from a wide range of scientific disciplines. A structured framework allows compilation, execution and analysis to be configured and carried out via standard input files.

The codes were chosen as representative of the scientific projects performed on the DEISA supercomputers. The codes and associated datasets were selected for benchmarking systems with peak performances ranging up to hundreds of teraflops, machines which are more powerful than a desktop personal computer by factors of tens of thousands.

The suite contained codes relevant to astrophysics, fluid dynamics, climate modelling, biosciences, materials science, fusion power and fundamental particle physics. It has been run by DEISA on a range of its own supercomputers and records of the results are kept for comparison.[ where? ] The DEISA benchmark was used by the EU-funded PRACE project as a starting point for their investigations of benchmarks for the next generation of petaflop supercomputers.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputer</span> Type of extremely powerful computer

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In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Diego Supercomputer Center</span> Supercomputer at UC San Diego.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). SDSC is located at the UCSD campus' Eleanor Roosevelt College east end, immediately north the Hopkins Parking Structure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-performance computing</span> Computing with supercomputers and clusters

High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.

UNICORE (UNiform Interface to COmputing REsources) is a grid computing technology for resources such as supercomputers or cluster systems and information stored in databases. UNICORE was developed in two projects funded by the German ministry for education and research (BMBF). In European-funded projects UNICORE evolved to a middleware system used at several supercomputer centers. UNICORE served as a basis in other research projects. The UNICORE technology is open source under BSD licence and available at SourceForge.

United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TeraGrid</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre</span> Supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.

Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is the national high-performance computing centre of Switzerland. It was founded in Manno, canton Ticino, in 1991. In March 2012, the CSCS moved to its new location in Lugano-Cornaredo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SLinCA@Home</span> BOINC based volunteer computing project researching LHC development

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Europe</span> Overview of supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

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The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnership in High Performance Computing (HPC), enabling the pooling of European Union–level resources with the resources of participating EU Member States and participating associated states of the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programmes, as well as private stakeholders. The Joint Undertaking has the twin stated aims of developing a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, and supporting research and innovation activities. Located in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, the Joint Undertaking started operating in November 2018 under the control of the European Commission and became autonomous in 2020.

References

  1. ↑ "Distributed European Infrastructure for supercomputing applications". Project funding web site. CORDIS . Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  2. ↑ "Distributed European infrastructure for supercomputing applications 2". Project funding web site. CORDIS . Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  3. ↑ "DEISA2: Supporting and developing a European high-performance computing ecosystem". Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  4. ↑ "DEISA supercomputing network". Britannica Science&Tech web site. Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  5. ↑ "PRACE". PRACE aisbl web site. Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  6. ↑ "TeraGrid supercomputing network". Britannica Science&Tech web site. Retrieved 23 December 2023.
  7. ↑ "Exploring the hyper-grid idea with grand challenge applications: the DEISA-TeraGrid interoperability demonstration" . Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  8. ↑ "DEISA: Advancing Science in Europe" (PDF). Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  9. ↑ "DEISA Digest 2008" (PDF). Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  10. ↑ "DEISA Digest 2010" (PDF). Retrieved 21 December 2023.
  11. ↑ "DEISA Digest 2011" (PDF). Retrieved 21 December 2023.


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