PRACE 5th Industrial Executive Seminar HPC changing Europe’s industrial landscape

5th PRACE Industrial Executive Seminar HPC changing Europe’s industrial landscape

Stuttgart, Tuesday, 14 May 2013PRACE, the pan-European high-end computing infrastructure held its 5th Industrial Seminar on 15 and 16 April in the Stuttgart area in Germany. The event attracted 74 executive attendees from 56 companies (including 18 SMEs) from 10 countries. 20 of the companies present attended such an event for the first time. The most represented industrial sectors were Engineering (11 companies), Aeronautics (7) and Automobile (6).

The programme of the event covered two days of talks, parallel sessions and workshops by almost 40 speakers on topics such as success stories of HPC use by industry, the PRACE OpenR&D industrial offer including access to leading edge HPC systems as well as high level services of support provided by PRACE, and HPC technology and application enabling. In particular, the attendees learnt about PRACE’s future plans in the area of industrial relations, including the launch during the summer of the pilot of SHAPE, the PRACE-supported SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe.

The participants’ feedback on the event has been positive: “These seminars are very productive for our organization in order to obtain feedback from other companies and expand our network,” said one enthusiastic entrepreneur.

The seminar was also an opportunity to award the prizes of the PRACE Competition for the Most Innovative HPC Industrial Application, presented by PRACE Council Chair Catherine Rivière. The winner of the second round of this contest was CERFACS in France with their scalable combustion code application AVBP. The second prize was awarded to Termo Fluids of Spain and the third prize to DigiCortex of Germany.