The National Institute for Research in Computer Science and in Automatic (INRIA) and the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computing (CERFACS) have created a national joint research laboratory in order to develop methods and tools dedicated to high performance computing and thus respond to the challenges of high performance simulation.
High Performance Computing, the heart of the technological and scientific advances.
The intensive scientific calculation and the numerical simulation gained a significant importance in most of the scientific fields and for the majority of technological applications. The numerical simulation or the in silico experimentation represents very often the only available approach for analyzing complex systems and solving important problems impossible to experience otherwise, while they are critical for the future. With the help of modeling technics always finer and algorithmic tools always faster that are running on high performance computers, the researchers and the engineers obtained answers of increasing relevance for the scientific challenges in medicine, biology, climatology, problems of energy and environment, to name a few areas. To support these developments and enable the scientists from academia and industry to use these computers always more powerful, research deserves to be continued and reinforced.
Guarantee the "scalability", or how to solve the challenges reachable thanks to the use of increasingly powerful computers.
The availability in 2011 of generalist computers with sustained petaflop (1015 floating point operations per second) and a little later of exaflop (1018 floating point operations per second), challenges the complete simulation chain as all its computational components must “scale”, that is to run efficiently on a large number of processing cores. This issue is mobilizing the international scientific community both in Europe (project PRACE) and the United States (project IESP).
A joint national laboratory that can respond to the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach
The research efforts for the development of methods and tools dedicated to high performance simulations are covering the entire continuum of skills from the mathematical modelling to the full-scale validation of complex multi-physics and multi-scale simulations that must run efficiently on the most powerful parallel computers at a given time. They're multidisciplinary by nature and related especially to applied mathematics to computer science but also to the application fields that are playing a major role in the simulation approach.
This range of scientific skills is the heart of the knowledge and expertise of INRIA and CERFACS.
“By combining the research and development potentials of our two organizations in the field of high performance computing, we are confident that we will have a greater scientific impact. The creation of this laboratory confirms our commitment to contribute to major advances in this field; it takes part of the same dynamic as for the creation of our joint laboratory with the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in last June” says Michel Cosnard, CEO of INRIA.
“By creating this joint lab with INRIA, we combine our complementary skills in order to develop algorithmic methods, indispensable to take full advantage of tomorrow's supercomputers” says Jean-Claude André, Director of CERFACS.
The scientific activities of the INRIA / CERFACS "Joint laboratory on High Performance Computing" will be structured in "Research Initiatives" and it will involve staff and resources of both organizations. The first one is a project-team (HiePACS - High-End Parallel Algorithms for Challenging Numerical Simulations) common to INRIA Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest, PRES of Bordeaux and CNRS (LaBRI UMR 5800 that is an associated laboratory with INRIA) and which includes permanent researchers from the team "ALGO" from CERFACS. The director of the joint laboratory is Jean Roman, Professor of Computer Science at the Polytechnic Institute of Bordeaux and currently on secondment at INRIA.
About INRIA
INRIA (The National Institute for Research in Computer Science and in Automatic) is a public institution with a scientific and technological character under the dual authority of the Research and Industry Ministries.
Directors: Michel Cosnard - CEO of INRIA; Antoine Petit - Deputy Managing Director.
Annual budget (2009): 200 M € including 21% of own resources.
Regional Research Centres: Paris - Rocquencourt, Sophia Antipolis - Méditérannée, Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes, Nancy - Grand Est, Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique, Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest, Lille - Nord Europe, Saclay - Ile-de-France.
It includes 2800 researchers, including 1000 PhD students, working in nearly 170 project-teams most of which are common with other major organizations like engineering schools and universities.
It has 80 teams associated in the world and has created one hundred companies since 1984.
For more information: http://www.inria.fr
About CERFACS
CERFACS (The European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computing) has as main objective to develop parallel advanced methods and numerical simulations for the most powerful supercomputers; these parallel numerical tools are used in many of the major research challenges, basic or more applied, and in many industrial applications.
It trains researchers and engineers in various scientific areas: computational science, applied mathematics, fluid dynamics with two major research axes in the domain of aerodynamics and turbulent combustion, electromagnetism and acoustic, climate and global changes.
CERFACS houses over 120 researchers and engineers. It is constituted as a civil society with 7 shareholders: CNES, EDF, Meteo-France, ONERA, EADS, SAFRAN and TOTAL.
For more information: http://www.cerfacs.fr