The European Commission is stimulating the support for eScience with e-Infrastructures consisting of high-speed networking, Grid infrastructures, and data infrastructures. A relative new item is supercomputing. The DEISA project did and does combine a number of European supercomputers into a supercomputer Grid. With the funding of the PRACE project, the Commission funds the development of a European supercomputer strategy. The goal is to increase the number of Europe-based supercomputers in the upper regions of the TOP500. Also the European IT industry should be encouraged. At first, the ideas were a bit hardware system focused using a pyramid with at the top a few tier-0 systems, then a level with tier-1 country systems, etc. But now, Maria Ramalho Natário, from the European Commission explained at the DEISA/PRACE symposium in Amsterdam, that the focus is more on a complete eco-system, with also different machines or Grids at different levels, but accessible by a scientist through a workspace that hides as much as possible the complexity of the systems and the Grids, and can create work flows where different steps can use different system architectures or Grids when needed. The next funding call for projects, that will open in July and closes in November will support this complete eco-system.

Horst Gietl, Executive Consultant, Prometeus GmbH & Hans Meuer, General Chair of ISC'09 in Hamburg, Prometeus GmbH

If we calculate the performance predictions for the TOP500 list, then we will see a 100 Petaflops system most likely in the year 2016. In the past we had a performance increase within 11 years from Gigaflops (Cray2 in 1986), via Teraflops (Intel ASCI Red in 1997) up to the Petaflops (IBM Roadrunner in 2008) by a factor of 1000.

Despite these performance improvements the HPC arena will more and more be defined indirectly via the highly compute-intensive applications. They are coming from a variety of areas, involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and improved seismic processing for oil exploration for continued supply. For most of these applications detailed results may only be achieved with systems in the Petaflops range. And hopefully Exascale Systems will be seen first in 2019.

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