VSC's co-ordinator Kurt Lust explained that the goal of the Flemish Supercomputer Centre is to get sustainable funding for a longer period, starting in 2011, allowing for doubling the computer capacity each year. This will not only help scientists in Flanders, but also give industry a boost. That is why the Flemish government put a lot of money in the centre, confirmed Patricia Ceyssens of the Flemish Government. The government thinks it is important to invest in research and development to create knowledge in universities and industry. In these times of economic crisis this seems the best way to tackle the economic problems.

Charles Hirsch, chairman of the HPC group of the Flemish academy of sciences, tried to push on using the momentum created. Why not try to become one of the five major European HPC regions. Flanders has the financial means to do that and it would be a big stimulus for an innovation-driven economy.

Why do the scientists in Flanders need a supercomputer? In the academic programme Patrick Bultinck explained the use that chemistry researchers everywhere in the world, and also in Flanders, make of supercomputers for simulations. He summarized that for researchers the following equation is true: HPC=O2.

The biggest users of the Leuven HPC cluster during the past period were linguistic researchers, explained Kris Heylen. They used 13 years of CPU times to parse 7 years of 6 Belgian newspapers. In total the new database consists of 1.5 billion words and 100 million sentences. It took them 6 real months to produce. Using this database they can now look for meaning of words using similary approaches: when for instance the word "ongeval" and "ongeluk" are used in a lot of similar cases, these words must have similar meanings. Even if you do not know the language you can perform this type of analysis. Of course, they can do much more sophisticated analysis with it.

Another new application area for supercomputers is Customer Relationship Marketing as was explained by Dirk Van den Poel. They have two different kinds of computing needs. For data acquisition and preparation they use tools like SQL, PL/SQL and SAS. This requires machines with large disk space and memory. For computational statistics ad data mining they use tools similar to that used in the sciences community: Matlab, Fortran, Fortran/MPI and Java. Hence they need two different types of infrastructures. The number crunching is very suitable for VSC's clusters and supercomputers. One of the compute intensive tasks they are doing is customer segmentation of large customer databases: Figure out what are the best characteristics to identify and separate different customer groups.

The Flemish Government has founded a new agency to fund infrastructures needed for fundamental and basic research for all scientific disciplines. This agency called Hercules Stichting has funded for instance a large electron microscope and medical therapy equipment. They also financed 2 million euro of the total 8 million euro of funding of the VSC.

For more information you can visit the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum website.