The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is a joint initiative between the EU and European countries working to ensure European researchers' access to world-class HPC computing power. With the installation of three pre-exascale, five petascale, and two upcoming exascale supercomputers, European researchers now have access to facilities that can compete with the top models globally. The host institutions for these supercomputers are now coming together in a new four-year project aimed at strengthening professional support across European facilities.
Elevating support: From Helpdesk to Advanced Level
"With the EPICURE project, we aim to strengthen professional support and maximize the utilization of expert competencies in Europe. The goal is to establish an efficient organization to facilitate knowledge sharing and targeted development initiatives and to establish a collaborative structure to ensure support across the facilities." Rune Gamborg Ørum, project manager, DeiC
So far, the support provided has primarily focused on solving operational problems. The EPICURE project aims to ensure users receive assistance at an advanced level and to ensure they can seamlessly switch between different facilities despite differences in system architecture.
The EPICURE project will offer a wide range of services, including code activation and scaling, performance analysis and benchmarking, as well as code optimization. This will be achieved through collaboration between the participating partners who will contribute their expertise in HPC operation and support. There will also be a focus on training activities and hackathons to promote knowledge sharing in areas such as porting, optimization, parallelization, and GPU programming.
Increased Accessibility and User-Friendliness
From DeiC's perspective, the EPICURE project supports the strategic goal of making HPC accessible to researchers across disciplinary boundaries and levels of experience. For this reason, DeiC aims, through EPICURE, to implement container and Cotainr (Link: https://cotainr.readthedocs.io/) as known from LUMI, as standard across all EuroHPC facilities to ensure accessibility and user-friendliness.
"We hope that the EPICURE project will make it easier for our users to transition from a national HPC system to any of the EuroHPC supercomputers. We hope that EPICURE will provide guidelines, training, tools, and general support that make it easy for users to choose the right EuroHPC facility for a particular task and make it easy to get started on that task on the supercomputer." Christian Schou Oxvig, HPC specialist, DeiC.
The EPICURE project (High-level specialized application support service in High-Performance Computing) involves 16 partners and is led by CSC - IT Center for Science.
Read more about EPICURE here.
Read more about the EuroHPC collaboration here.
For further information, please contact:
Rune Gamborg Ørum: rune.oerum@deic.dk
EPICURE is a research and innovation project funded by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking.
