Luxinnovation, LuxProvide and the University of Luxembourg are collaborating to develop holistic support for companies, academia and public administrations that could benefit from using the supercomputing capacities available in Luxembourg. They have set up a coordination and contact point for HPC activities in Luxembourg: the National Competence Centre in High-Performance Computing.
Promoting Luxembourg’s HPC capacities
HPC offers a great range of opportunities to generate business value, to enable new discoveries in research and to boost processes within all types of organisations. However, many organisations in Luxembourg are not yet aware of the benefits of using supercomputers, or do not know about the HPC systems available in the country and how they can access and use them.
That is why the three partners of the national HPC competence centre have started raising awareness about supercomputing applications in different sectors. Last summer, they launched a survey to investigate the HPC skills and training needs in industry, academia and any other type of organisations that are dealing with large amounts of data or computing power.
“The survey was very successful and obtained more than 150 responses,” says Valentin Plugaru, CTO of LuxProvide. “The data collected is valuable, and to demonstrate how much we appreciate respondents’ time, we offered a guided tour of Luxembourg’s supercomputer MeluXina to those who offered the most complete responses to the questions of the survey.”
A better understanding of needs and capacities
On Thursday 25 November, a group of 11 people was invited to attend the guided tour of the MeluXina in Bissen. Mr Plugaru introduced the participants to the different components of MeluXina’s architecture and the specific characteristics of the system.
The tour was insightful for attendees, but also for us as it helped us understand their current or potential HPC use.
“The tour was insightful for attendees, but also for us as it helped us understand their current or potential HPC use,” Mr Plugaru points out. “The participants asked some good questions and some industrial players requested a follow-up meeting with our team of experts to explore their ideas and transform them into HPC-enabled projects.”
“HPC Thursdays” webinar series
The survey results help the national HPC competence centre to set up actions that fill the gap between the needs identified and the HPC services available in Luxembourg, such as creating new HPC training courses and launching new awareness-raising campaigns about supercomputing applications. The three partners are now in the process of launching a webinar series entitled “HPC Thursdays” which will take place online twice per month on Thursdays from 11:00 to 12:00, starting from 20 January 2022.
The aim of the webinar series is to inform about the HPC infrastructure available in Luxembourg, and to explain what a supercomputer is, how it works, and why it should be used. It will also provide examples of HPC use cases from different sectors such as industry 4.0, health, finance, and so on.
The intention is to provide beginners with basic HPC knowledge using simple language. The webinars will emphasise why the results achieved with HPC could not be achieved otherwise.