In 2016, computational chemist Zoe Cournia was awarded the first ever PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC for her work in computer-aided drug design. She talks about her work and how she believes more needs to be done to bridge the gap between researchers and the general public.
In The Summer of HPC is a PRACE programme that offers summer placements at HPC centres across Europe. Up to 20 top applicants from across Europe are selected to participate. Participants spend two months working on projects related to PRACE technical or industrial work to produce a visualisation or video.
In a collaborative work with CERFACS, Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse, Centralesupelec, ONERA, DLR and TU Munchen, researchers have been able to use the CERFACS LES code AVBP to simulate the instabilities which appear in certain rocket engines under extreme conditions. The simulation was performed thanks to a PRACE allocation of 80 M hours. The massively parallel capacities offered by AVBP have allowed to run on 65 536 processors in production mode (the code itself scales up to 200 000 cores) on the Bluegene Q machine of CINECA.
When a galaxy stops forming stars, the remaining stars will slowly fade away and the galaxy will “die”. But what causes this to happen? Orianne Roos has been simulating primeval star-forming galaxies to try and understand how winds from stars and supermassive black holes can couple to affect the gas content of the galaxy and its ability to form new stars.
The mechanism behind the explosion has not been fully untangled. Scientists are looking to three-dimensional computer modelling for help.
NEXIO SIMULATION is a French SME and subsidiary of Nexio Group, develops electromagnetic simulation software called CAPITOLE-EM to study the electromagnetic behaviour of any product during the design process, before the manufacturing phase. After a first step performed locally in France using the HPC-PME initiative, their PRACE SHAPE Project has allowed them by accessing to HPC resources and expertise in HPC and numerical simulation to jump from a personal computer version of this software to an HPC version.
Via PRACE SHAPE NSilico teamed up with computational experts from CINES (France) and ICHEC (Ireland) to address the key problem of rapid alignment of short DNA sequences to reference genomes by deploying the Smith-Waterman algorithm on an emerging many-core technology, the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor.
OPTIMA pharma GmbH, the pharma division of OPTIMA packaging group GmbH, produces and develops filling and packaging machines for pharmaceutical products – sterile and non-sterile liquids – and pharmaceutical freeze drying systems as well as isolator (clean room) and containment technology. Their project supported by SHAPE simulated the airflow in clean rooms to make them even cleaner.
Juan Yacht Design, a Spanish SME specialised in the design of cruising yachts and racing boats especially for America’s Cup and the Volvo Ocean Race, received an allocation via the PRACE SME HPC Adoption Programme for Europe (SHAPE) as part of the 15th cut-off of PRACE Preparatory Access. This will allow them to implement LES (Large Eddy Simulations) models to simulate flow around sails to replace the RANS (Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes) models that are standard in the industry.
The goal of this project is to understand the properties of elementary particles such as the proton, which forms most of the ordinary matter around us. The fundamental theory that determines the mass and structure of such particles is the strong interaction, one of the four forces known to us, the others being electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and gravity.
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