D7.1: Periodic Report on Results from Projects Supported by Applications Enabling and Porting Services

Applications Enabling and Porting Services in Work Package 7 (WP7) of PRACE-6IP aims to provide HPC enabling support for the applications of European researchers and small and medium enterprises to ensure the applications can effectively exploit the various PRACE HPC systems. Most of the activities are ongoing and were already established and described in deliverables of former PRACE-IP projects. There are four activities described in this deliverable:
T7.1 Applications Enabling Services for Preparatory Access:
This activity provides code enabling and optimisation to European researchers as well as industrial projects to make their applications ready for Tier-0 systems. Projects can continuously apply for such services via the Preparatory Access Calls Type C (PA Type C) and Type D (PA Type D) with a cut-off every three months for evaluation of the proposals. PA Type C provides support and access to a PRACE Tier-0 system while PA Type D provides support and access to a PRACE Tier-1 system to finally reach Tier-0 scalability. In total six Preparatory Access cut-offs have been carried out in PRACE-6IP so far and 16 projects received support within the context of the project.
Beside the statistical overview about the cut-offs and all supported PRACE PA Type C and Type D projects, the report focuses on the optimisation work and results gained by the completed projects in PRACE-6IP. In total eight PA projects have finished their work since the last deliverable D7.2 of PRACE-5IP and are reported within this deliverable.
T7.2 Applications Enabling Services for Industry (SHAPE):
This activity has continued the support for SHAPE (the SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) into the PRACE-6IP project. SHAPE aims to raise awareness of HPC within European SMEs by providing them with the expertise necessary to take advantage of the innovation possibilities created by HPC with the aim of increasing the SME’s competitiveness. The programme runs a series of regular calls with successful applicants getting support effort from a PRACE HPC expert and access to machine time at a PRACE centre.
One of the key focuses of the last few calls has been to increase the number of countries benefiting from SHAPE support. To this end the SHAPE+ initiative was developed where an allocation of effort is provided to support SMEs from countries new to SHAPE in cases where the local partners don’t have existing SHAPE effort. There are good signs that this is working as the number of countries where SMEs have applied to SHAPE, and where SHAPE effort has been awarded, has been increasing more rapidly for the last few calls.
More generally there has been a focus on better dissemination of SHAPE to increase the overall number of proposals. This has been greatly assisted by the employment in September 2019 of a PRACE Industry Liaison Officer who brings a wealth of expertise in communicating with industry. He has first developed a new market proposal for SHAPE which was then tested by him “on the field” by engaging in over 220 face-to-face meetings with managers of European SMEs at 17 industry-specific trade shows. Furthermore, he presented SHAPE to the membership base of several business/innovation clusters in Europe. The feedback he reported back to the SHAPE Project Manager was overwhelmingly positive and indicated a very clear demand for the programme in the R&D-driven business community. This also shows in the increase in the number of proposals SHAPE receives. For the most recent call (SHAPE 11) we received 10 proposals - the largest number since call 2 (back in 2015) and the largest number we have received since the frequency of calls was increased to 2 per year where until this most recent call the average number of proposals had been just under 6.
We report here on the current status of each SHAPE project and highlights of the work carried out. In 2019 [4] we developed surveys for SMEs and PRACE partners where projects had completed around a year ago. These were very successful in gaining both quantitative and qualitative information about the effectiveness of the SHAPE programme and so the exercise was repeated with a slightly updated survey. The results were again positive.
T7.3 DECI Management and Applications Porting:
The DECI (Distributed European Computing Initiative) programme began in 2005 as part of DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications), later moving into the PRACE Implementation Phase (IP) projects and then run as a PRACE “Optional Programme”. Presently it runs under the Applications Enabling and Support Workpackage (Work Package 7) within PRACE-6IP. The most recent DECI call (DECI-16) closed on 31 January 2020.
The DECI programme provides access to Tier-1 resources across Europe via a resource exchange programme and for the last few years calls have been issued yearly. Calls remain popular with researchers and since the programme began, over 1000 proposals have been received with the last two calls both receiving around 70 proposals resulting in 40 and 48 projects respectively.
Here we focus on the projects from the two most recent DECI calls which have provided around 150M machine core hours each to European researchers from 88 different DECI projects, from 22 different countries across a wide range or architectures provided from 13 different countries.
T7.5 Enhancing the High-Level Support Teams:
T7.5 is a new task implemented in PRACE-6IP. It will provide additional effort to enhance the work of the PRACE High-Level Support Teams (HLSTs). Under PRACE 2, there are coordinated HLSTs at each Tier-0 centre that provide users with support for code enabling and scaling out of scientific applications and methods, as well as for Research & Development on code refactoring on the Tier-0 systems. The HLSTs will enhance the scientific output of the Tier-0 systems through the provision of level 3 (midterm activities) support activities. Task 7.5 supplements those activities and extends this work with specific expertise from the other PRACE centres. This ensures sharing of expertise across PRACE to maximise the benefits to users of the PRACE systems. Task 7.5 will work with the HLSTs to extend and enhance their activities supporting Tier-0 users, and also Tier-1 intensive users targeting Tier-0, in order to maximise the scientific output of the Tier-0 systems.
During the first half of the project, we focused on defining the process of project selection, based on criteria that meet what Tier-0 systems can provide to the users (scalability, new architectures, memory/storage ...). The support activity brought to the users was also defined, and two projects have already started within the task.
During the second half of the project we will continue the activity on Petascale and Pre-exascale systems, which is the main target for the activity, and we expect to have an increased effort of the partners on those new systems by the end of the project.