Forty five projects have been awarded a total of 30
million hours on a network of Europe's most powerful supercomputers
as part of Europe'sExtreme
Computinginitiative to enhance Europe's
competitiveness in science and technology.
The 45
projects deal with complex, demanding, innovative simulations
that would be impossible without the supercomputer network.
Projects cover materials science (12), astro sciences (8),
engineering (8), life sciences (8), earth sciences (4), plasma
physics (3), and informatics (2). Scientists from 14 European
countries plus Canada, US, Brazil, Chile and Israel will work on
them.
An earlier project modelled membrane-mediated interactions to
show that curvy membranes make proteins attractive.
Europe's high-performance computing infrastructure Deisa
(Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing
Applications) consists of leading national supercomputers
interconnected with a 10 Gbps point-to-point network provided by
GEANT, Europe's dedicated
network for R&D, and the national research networks. Selected
middleware allows the deployment and operation of services that
enable high performance distributed computing.
Networking supercomputers not only allows them to tackle bigger
problems. Going from a 16-processor machine to a 1024-processor
complex cuts the time to solve the equations from seven years to 40
days. It also extends the useful life of individual machines, which
declines relatively by 90% in five years according to Moore's
Law.