Close to 150 invited participants, especially decision makers are expected to attend including representatives from aerospace, car manufacturing, energy, chemicals, drug design and medical industry, metal industry,bioinformatics, telecommunication companies, finance, insurance, as well as HPC vendors, scientific software developers and service companies.

During the seminar participants will receive first hand information about the planned PRACE research infrastructure, services and usage.

Jean Marc Thomas, (right) VP Airbus France, will present examples of success stories about HPC usage of European aerospace industry. Also European Small and Medium Size companies will present their suggestions how PRACE could help increasing their competitiveness.

High Performance Computing is becoming more and more important for global companies that need to stay ahead of their competition - both in offering innovative products and services. Supercomputers are developing rapidly through the combination of technological advances and the rising stress of competition. This evolution requires continuous high investments.

But reports show that super-computers performance levels of the most powerful used in industry are around 6-7 years behind the world's fastest systems. US is currently making a concerted effort to shorten this gap, to secure the lead position of its economy, granting industrial access to publicly owned supercomputers.

The seminar contains four parallel sessions which will allow participants to discuss about their needs and expectations regarding the PRACE infrastructure and services, such as organisation and business models, network and security, relations with independent software vendors and license cost and finally user support and training needs.

The sessions will allow participants to have in depth discussions on industrial needs and expectations about the upcoming PRACE Infrastructure and associated services.

Session 1 "Organisation and business models" will be dedicated to discussions on when and how industrial users could use the PRACE Infrastructure. Different usage models will be discussed: one is "buying" CPU hours (On Demand Computing) for production purposes with strong SLA (Service Level Agreements); another is collaborative R&D where industrial users accessHPC facilities for free with the condition of communicating the results obtained.

Session 2 "Networking, security and confidentiality" focuses on accessing the PRACE Infrastructure (network cost, latency, band width) and security levels  and confidentiality of information exchanged or stored at the PRACE Tier-0 centres.

Session 3 "User support and training" features user support, service level agreements (porting and optimisation of industrial applications, visualisation, open source migration) and training needs.

Session 4 "Relations with independent software vendors" concentrates on commercial software usage of the PRACE Infrastructure, software license costs, and definition of independent software vendors. A new licensing model usage will also be discussed.

PRACE second industry seminar “Europe goes HPC” is organised by GENCI and GAUSS with the sponsorship of Airbus and Grand Toulouse.

Some of the companies going to participate the PRACE industry workshops are: Airbus, EDF, ONERA, Novartis, Aureus Pharma, TOTAL, Repsol, BNP Paribas, SNECMA, CS, ENI, Eurodecision, HydrOcean, FFT, Michelin, Arcelor Mittal, MUREX, Porsche, BMW and Renault Formula 1, to name a few.

Contace: PRACE