D3.1.3: First scientific conference

RACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, and DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, merged for the third time their annual science symposia into one big European HPC (High Performance Computing) event: The DEISA PRACE Symposium 2011. This symposium took place from April 13 to April 14 in Helsinki, Finland, and was hosted by CSC at the National Museum of Finland.
The theme of the symposium was “Advancements in Petaflop Computing", it was of major interest to a broad audience: from scientific users, EC representatives, HPC technology experts and vendors to government representatives and industry partners. The symposium attracted over 200 participants from 26 countries.
Prominent keynote speakers from all over the world gave their global perspectives of High Performance Computing. The symposium also featured speakers from different science communities. The scientific fields covered were astrophysics, quantum computing, space research, engineering, climate research, materials science, biophysics, life sciences, turbulence, nuclear physics, chemistry, and bio-engineering. Speakers from the DEISA project presented highlights of the DEISA project, which ended in April 2011. Tier-1 services as provided by DEISA will be integrated in the PRACE Research Infrastructure (RI).
The symposium also included the first PRACE User Forum. In this session PRACE representatives presented the services the PRACE RI offers to European scientists. The session ended with a panel discussion where HPC users expressed their opinions about the services of PRACE RI and the future of the PRACE User Forum. A group of HPC users from different scientific areas was established in order to facilitate fruitful PRACE User Forums in the future. The activities for the creation of a sustainable User Forum will be followed up by PRACE together with the group of users established during the first User Forum and other users from various scientific fields that have HPC needs for advancing their research work.
The DEISA PRACE symposium was very successful regarding to the number of participants, the relations to the European scientific communities established, and the overall feedback received from the participants.
The symposia series was carried out as DEISA Symposia in 2005 in Paris, 2006 in Bologna, 2007 in Munich, 2008 in Edinburgh, and was continued as DEISA PRACE Symposia 2009 in Amsterdam, 2010 in Barcelona and 2011 in Helsinki.