News & Events

CRESTA is looking forward to once again being well represented at this year’s SC13 which takes place from 17th – 22nd November in Denver, Colorado.

CRESTA’s fourth collaboration meeting was held in September in Helsinki, Sweden. As with all of our previous events, this was very well attended and proved to be very useful.

CRESTA has moved into its final year and it was therefore timely to refocus these meetings slightly – CSC hosted the meeting and arranged for hands on sessions on the Xeon-Phi. We also had a tutorial session on OpenACC and a series of case study talks on utilising the Xeon-Phi and OpenACC. The purpose was to ensure that technology developments within the project are properly exploited by partners, a key feature of our co-design strategy.

In addition to this, we had a series of talks highlighting the work within the project. There were also discussion sessions on how to take different activities forward, such as those activities around disruptive technologies.

All in all this was a great two days, held in the lovely autumnal weather in the beautiful setting around CSC in Espoo, Helsinki.

We look forward to returning to Stockholm for the next collaboration meeting in 2014.

CRESTA, DEEP and Mont-Blanc will be holding a joint BOF at SC13 this year. The three complementary projects underpin Europe’s strategy to achieve the exascale goal. These projects are now well established, making a comparison of Europe’s exascale approaches with that of other countries and continents particularly timely. The BOF will therefore debate these approaches and look to build cross-continent communities.

The BOF is particularly topical and relevant to the HPC community: the focus a few years ago on identifying the challenges associated with the Exascale problem has now moved on to early results and prototypes, providing the opportunity for a community led discussion to reassess current and future direction.

The BOF will be led by a panel of representatives from the CRESTA, DEEP and Mont-Blanc projects and will be chaired by Dr.-Ing. Bernd Mohr from Jülich Supercomputing Centre.

We hope the BOF will generate lively and interesting debate, please come along and join us if you can.

The BOF runs on Tuesday 19th November 2013 from 12.15pm – 1.15pm.

24th July 2013, HLRS, Stuttgart

A key focus within CRESTA is co-design – the close collaboration between systemware developers, technology partners and the application developers. Our work on the OpenFOAM code is no exception, bringing together partners from across the project.

HLRS hosted and led a co-design meeting at HLRS on the OpenFOAM code. This meeting reviewed progress across the different strands of work and looked to enhance collaboration between different work packages. In particular we highlighted the development of our turbine simulations, our work across possible exascale solvers and around IO issues.

Bringing together around 15 people, this was a successful co-design meeting which managed to overcome the distraction of a very exciting thunder storm and which helped to drive the OpenFOAM agenda forward.

Barcelona 10th & 11th July, 2013

CRESTA is one of three projects funded by the EC in 2011 to lead Europe’s strategy for producing European exascale hardware, software and applications. The other two projects, DEEP and Mont-Blanc, are developing prototype hardware and are complementary to CRESTA’s development of software and applications.

The three projects have always collaborated and the Mont-Blanc project hosted a joint collaboration meeting in Barcelona during the summer. The meeting brought together many of the technical people on the project, and we had a series of talks describing the work of the project.

In particular, we explored the different applications in each project and the challenges they face in preparing to utilise exascale platforms. We also considered the programming models and languages being used in each project, looking at the advantage and disadvantages of each approach. Finally, we explored the range of tools within the project, from performance analysis, through debugging, to the pre- and post- processing tools within CRESTA.

The result was a series of possible areas of overlap and potential collaborative opportunities. This was a very successful meeting in a beautiful city, and we look forward to the next joint meeting in Edinburgh in 2014.