On 4 and 5 February 2025, the first PRACE Intersection Seminar (PRACE IS) gathered over 50 participants at the history-infused premises of the Fondation Universitaire in Brussels, Belgium, to discuss the content of the next Edition of the PRACE Scientific and Innovation case, and to brainstorm about services that members of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) would like to see included in the association’s offer.
Under the title ‘Fillers and Joins for the PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case’ the Panel Chairs of the seven domain panels that update and create the content of the PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case – a publication that has helped shape the European HPC ecosystem for nearly two decades – came together to discuss the editorial schedule and brainstorm issues that impact users of HPC.
The upcoming edition of the PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case – foreseen for autumn 2025 – will have a dedicated chapter on artificial intelligence (AI). Topics such as quantum computing, open access, porting codes, and data management and storage will also be addressed. Equally novel to this edition will be a chapter on Social Sciences and Humanities, which will include sections on Economics, Finance and Linguistics and interdisciplinary fields such as Climate Economics. Access to data will be a key topic in this chapter. Last, but not least, the SIC will address the geopolitical and socio-economic framework that surrounds HPC and affects its users.
In parallel during the PRACE IS, representatives from PRACE, HPC Centres, and industry active in HPC, joined a workshop titled ‘Implementing PRACE as a Service’ and brainstormed ideas for member services that PRACE could implement in the coming months and years.
Making high quality training data available for future foundation models available via a cooperative platform was one idea that came out of this interactive session, a programme which facilitates the exchange and provision of compute and data resources, both traditional HPC and cloud-like, was another. Both topics as well as other ideas will be elaborated on in working groups, which can be joined by interested members of the European HPC community. Get in touch with Wahid Rofagha, Industry Liaison Officer here.
A significant part of the PRACE Intersection Seminar are the annual PRACE Awards. Dr. Nastasia Mauger, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States of America was awarded the 2024 PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC and Professor Luciano Rezzolla, Chair of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany was awarded the 2024 PRACE HPC Excellence Award. Both awardees gave presentations about their work and answered questions from the audience.
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