Blog

By Alberto Lanzanova, Emmanuel Ory, Ville Savolainen and Eeva Harjula (CSC)

 

 

Before EPICURE

 

 

Part of the responsibilities of the Hosting Entities is to provide support services to users that are selected by EuroHPC. These services are mostly limited to Level 1 support which entails a helpdesk support for day-by-day operational issues and problems. While other type of support are available, such as Level 2, these are generally limited to a short period of time and include only guidelines on how to complete a basic porting of their code, how to prepare the environment and how to perform their first runs on the system. This offering has been on best effort basis and subject to human resources availability from the side of the Hosting Entity.

 

 

What is EPICURE

 

 

The European supercomputing landscape of systems and services is now consolidated by EPICURE, a EuroHPC JU funded project that provides Level 2 and Level 3 support in a unified way. This four-year project brings together the Application Support Teams (ASTs) of all the current and future Hosting Entities of the EuroHPC JU systems.

 

 

Supercomputers alone are not enough as high performing applications are needed to create new science and engineering. However, harnessing the performance of the accelerated systems requires efficient utilization of the hierarchical parallelism, from the CPUs and the GPUs to the full system level. As this expertise is not yet widely shared among the EuroHPC users, EPICURE aims at filling this gap by supplying the needed complementary skills and knowledge to users and application developers, so that the full capacity of the EuroHPC systems can be reached.

 

 

Enter EPICURE

 

 

Currently, thanks to EPICURE, the range of services offered has improved considerably and specifically include:

 

 

• Code Enabling and Scaling – porting and enabling codes for the different EuroHPC systems, and analysis of applications to understand their scalability,
• Performance Analysis – identifying bottlenecks and potential enhancements in node and multi-node performance (such as vectorization, utilization of suitable mathematical libraries, I/O optimization, MPI, etc.).
• Benchmarking – standardizing benchmarks to evaluate system performance,
• Code Refactoring – restructuring or rewriting parts of an application code to improve maintainability and ease modification, but without changing its function. It is usually the first step before major modifications are made (e.g., porting to GPUs),
• Code Optimization – improving the efficiency and performance of the software without changing its functionality.

 

By providing European scientists and researchers with the best possible service to enable their research, EPICURE is ensuring that the potential of the current and future EuroHPC systems is fully unlocked. Moreover, the training activities of the project will build and enhance the HPC programming skills of the present and future application developers, as well as of the ASTs themselves.

 

 

These EPICURE’s activities support EuroHPC JU in its quest to develop a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, and support research and innovation activities, which will ultimately have with an effect to the quality of scientific results and an overall positive impact on the European HPC domain.

 

 

How to apply

 

 

– Just link to the page – https://epicure-hpc.eu/support-services/  

 

 

Applying to the EPICURE service is extremely easy:

 

 

Check the open EuroHPC Access Calls on the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking website.

 

Submit an application for access time on EuroHPC Supercomputers through open EuroHPC Access Calls.

 

When applying for resources through EuroHPC Calls you will find also the following dedicated form to request support from EPICURE. Fill it in as comprehensively as possible when applying through EuroHPC Access Calls. Click here to see the preview of the form. Note that this form should be filled in only as part of the call application through EuroHPC JU website.

 

Find out full information how to access to EuroHPC Systems and request assistance from EPICURE.

 

For any questions, do not hesitate to reach us at: pmo-epicure@postit.csc.fi