At the 27th PRACE Council Meeting, held in Amsterdam on 17 October 2017, the PRACE Members unanimously approved the application of Luxembourg to become a member of the Partnership for Advanced computing in Europe.
Luxembourg becomes the 25th Member of PRACE. Prof Pascal Bouvry will serve as Delegate on the PRACE Council, while Dr Sebastien Varrette will serve as Advisor.
I am very pleased to welcome Luxembourg as the 25th Member of PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. Luxembourg recognises the importance of HPC for science and industry, and joining PRACE will offer many synergy benefits to all members. I am looking forward to a fruitful partnership with Luxembourg in the coming years.
Prof Dr Anwar Osseyran, Chair of the PRACE Council.
Founded in 2003, the University of Luxembourg (UL) is the first and only public university of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Multilingual, international and research-oriented, the UL is a modern institution with a personal atmosphere, close to European institutions, innovative companies and the financial place.
The UL implemented the first public HPC platform in Luxembourg in 2007. An expert team manages the HPC facility. Composed of several clusters of compute nodes, the UL HPC platform has kept growing over time thanks to the continuous efforts of the UL HPC. Special focus was laid on the development of large computing power combined with huge data storage capacity to accelerate the research performed in intensive computing and large-scale data analytic (Big Data). This characteristic distinguishes the HPC centre at the university from many other HPC facilities, which often concentrate on only one of these two pillars. In all cases, from its current computing and storage capacities, the HPC centre of the University of Luxembourg remains one of the major actors in HPC and Big Data for the Greater Region Saar-Lor-Lux, serving over 450 active users.
From its reputation and national expertise in the HPC and Big Data domains, the University of Luxembourg, receiving the support from all public research centres in Luxembourg, was chosen by the ministry to represent the country within PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). This implements a new step in the governmental priority aiming at accelerating the development of world-class HPC technologies in Luxembourg.
Prof Pascal Bouvry, “Chargé de Mission auprès du Recteur” in charge of the University High Performance Computing.
This article was first published on www.prace-ri.eu on Monday 6 November 2017.
