A quick note on today’s DEISA announcement:
The second phase of the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) initiative was announced earlier today. DEISA2 is being funded as a three year contract within the EU Framework Programme 7. Like its US-based TeraGrid counterpart, DEISA links up regional supercomputing centers in order to create a common HPC resource for the research community.
According to Wolfgang Gentzsch, dissemination advisor for DEISA, “In Europe, DEISA is the single-most important HPC initiative in that it now connects the 11 largest European HPC Centers into one huge European HPC ecosystem built on grid technology, and accessible through UNICORE grid middleware.”
Today’s announcement makes special note of DEISA’s future plans with the PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) project:
Of strategic importance is the cooperation with the PRACE project, which is preparing for the installation of a limited number of leadership-class Tier-0 supercomputers in Europe. The key role and aim will be to deliver a turnkey operational solution for a future persistent European HPC ecosystem, as suggested by ESFRI. The ecosystem will integrate national Tier-1 centres and the new Tier-0 centres.
While the US currently dominates leadership class supercomputing, PRACE is making plans to establish petascale computing in Europe within the next couple of years. The project was launched in January 2008 and has a two-year startup budget of €20 million ($31 million).
We hope to do some follow-up coverage of DEISA and PRACE in the coming weeks.