PRACE Showcase the Principles of HPC at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS)

Over 30 countries sent their best and brightest to this year’s EUCYS, its 25th edition. It was a public event where people came to see the novel R&D produced by the primary and secondary students from all across Europe and special guests from further afield including South Korea, Canada, and the USA. In addition to the contestant area, there was an exhibitor space and this year PRACE had a booth to showcase the applications of supercomputing. Over 2,500 members of the general public attended the event.

"EUCYS was a great success again this year. PRACE added another dimension to the exhibitor area where they introduced the world of supercomputers to the contestants and guests. I was thrilled to see the stand so busy every time I went by. I feel EUCYS is an ideal medium to reach out to the next generation of supercomputer users and we look forward to seeing PRACE again next year in Warsaw, Poland"

- Karen Slavin, Project Officer for EUCYS, [email protected]

The booth included a bespoke design with three demos:

The first was the result of the PRACE Summer of HPC at EPCC PRACE’s UK Member. The visitors were able to create their very own dinosaur and watch them race against others. The calculations were even performed on the HECToR machine in Scotland. This demo illustrated the variety of applications that run on supercomputers. More about the demo can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_Whk1_FJfk.

The second demo was a custom-made raspberry pi mini supercomputer designed and built by our Irish partner ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing). Two visualizations were presented including a parallel version of Conway’s Game of Life that highlighted domain decomposition of problems and a ray-tracing demo where the speed up of parallel processing was clear to all.

The final demo was the shooting stars videogame from the Dare to Think the Impossible outreach campaign.

The staff at the booth from VSB-TUO/IT4Innovations, ICHEC, and EPCC really enjoyed presenting the work of PRACE to the public. We look forward to next year’s EUCYS in Warsaw, Poland.

"The EUCYS was a great success for PRACE. All visitors, old, young and even the smallest ones, to the booth really enjoyed our demos. Events like EUCYS and attendance by PRACE inspire young people to students science, technology, engineering or mathematics thus ensuring Europe produces the next generation of HPC users, software developers and system administrators."

- Dr. Vit Vondrak, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic & PRACE Council Member

Images of the PRACE booth and activities at EUCYS 2013 can be found here: http://www.prace-ri.eu/EUCYS-2013.

About PRACE

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 4 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements RI-261557, RI-283493 and RI-312763. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu

Other Links

PRACE Summer of HPC (http://summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu)

EPCC (http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk)

ICHEC (http://www.ichec.ie)

VSB-TUO/IT4Innovations (http://www.it4i.cz/en/index.php)

HECToR (http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/facilities/hector)

Dare to Think the Impossible (https://www.facebook.com/daretothinktheimpossible)

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Telephone: +32 2 613 09 27 E-mail: M.Oorsprong[at]staff.prace-ri.eu