- International partnership a cause to cheer at PRACEDays17 in Barcelona
- Agreement facilitates research for scholars working on three continents
- MoU outlines shared use of supercomputers, information exchange, and technical meetings
It was an international celebration in Barcelona, Spain, as representatives from three continents met at PRACEdays17 to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU), formalizing a new era in advanced research computing.
On hand to recognize the partnership were John Towns, principal investigator of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), Serge Bogaerts, managing director of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), and Masahiro Seki, president of the Japanese Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (RIST).
“We are excited about this development and fully expect this effort will support the growing number of international collaborations emerging across all fields of scholarship,” says Towns.
As steward of the US supercomputing infrastructure, XSEDE will share their socio-technical platform that integrates and coordinates the advanced digital services that support contemporary science across the country.
PRACE brings a federated European supercomputing infrastructure to the new international partnership, and RIST agrees to share use of the K computer and other HPC systems in Japan.
“The aim of the memorandum is to implement fruitful exchange of information and HPC resources,” says Bogaerts. “This helps PRACE, RIST, and XSEDE to promote the shared use of our supercomputers more effectively.”
The MoU also spells out a mutual swap of experiences and knowledge in user selection and user support, and proposes technical meetings that can support cross-organizational collaboration.
Though these are principles already held in common, the MoU will serve to deepen their cooperation, Towns notes.
“So far, Japan and Europe have been successfully promoting user-beneficial information transfer,” says Seki. “With XSEDE added as a partner, we expect global collaborations with both the EU and US, increasing our supercomputing skills and improving the productivity of research teams distributed around the globe.”
Despite rumors of international divisions, it’s heartening to see that global partnerships do exist.
This spirit of cooperation seen in the MoU between PRACE, RIST, and XSEDE demonstrates that worldwide friendship and collaboration are doing well among members of the advanced research computing community.
