Looking back at a successful year at hpc-ch
Dear colleagues,
Before we embark on a new and challenging year ahead, I’d like to look back briefly on a successful year for hpc-ch in 2013.
We started the year extending our community, originally consisting solely of representatives from academia, to include representatives from industry who are also operating HPC systems. To differentiate the two communities (which will, nonetheless, work closely together), we introduced the following names:
- hpc-ch Academia, comprising Swiss universities and public research centers
- hpc-ch Industry, comprising industry and private research centers
In May with had the first Forum bringing together both communities, entitled “HPC and Industries”, kindly hosted by Novartis in Basel.
In June we participated at the ISC13 conference in Leipzig. This time we had a larger booth with a new improved design.
On October 23, EPFL, Vital-IT and the University of Lausanne hosted a Forum dedicated to Hardware Life-Cycle and User Policies for HPC systems. As is tradition, we visited one of the science laboratories that relies on calculations performed on HPC systems: on this occasion it was the Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas CRPP at EPFL, with its Tokamak experiment. TCV is a medium sized tokamak and is being used to analyze plasma confined in a magnetic field.
Finally, in November, we hosted our own booth at the SC13 conference in Denver. As in the past there were a lot of visitors interested both in getting an update about HPC activities in Switzerland and also getting some good coffee and Swiss chocolate!
