We organised our very first HPC Workshop!

“HPC should be a product, and everyone should know when they need it” – a report about the first HPC Workshop

The first HPC Workshop organised by KIFU’s HPC Competence Centre took place on 8 November 2021 in the EDU&FUN Digital Adventure Centre in Budapest. The most important lesson learnt by the 26 participants – KIFU’s HPC experts, future and active users, and market players – was that a regular exchange of thoughts is very much necessary.

The first topic that emerged was the definition of engineering problems, that is, the use of supercomputers in industrial innovation. The participants agreed that the available capacities already represent huge opportunities but they need to be much more widely known for competitive market demand and users to emerge. With regard to extending the HPC user community, it was said that the real resource needs manifest in the field of human resources superseding the development of both computing and memory capacities.

The inevitable role of higher education in disseminating HPC knowledge also emerged since practical experience shows that this is the only way of multiplying the number of users and tasks to be solved, thereby creating an active community and, at the same time, an HPC culture. Practical uses were examined from all angles; topics that emerged included the development of the framework system which was elaborated by KIFU and proved appropriate for scientific research, the simplification of access, and the presentation of the associated services as products representing a profitable solution to market players. The questions addressing data security guarantees also pointed out that this is a pre-requisite for use by market players, and therefore, we need to place greater emphasis on their existence.

During the presentation of the most frequent HPC-related inquiries, it emerged again that user support is of great help even for experienced representatives of the academic community and is already a competitive advantage in the case of market players.

For an outline of the future, the anticipatory mood was created by presenting Komondor, the prospective new supercomputer. With its 5-petaflops performance, this machine will debut at around spot No.60 on the TOP500 world rank list (which measures 64-bit petaflops and not the 16-bit value that can be communicated in a better way), which is an outstanding number in this exceptionally strong international playing field. In this connection, many underlined the issues related to the purchase and use of software that can be run on a supercomputer – these are very much on the minds of all existing and potential users. Finally, the participants defined the supercomputer of the future; it will include user-friendly, fully supported, world-class hardware and services which can be used by a wider range of people for both small and big tasks, from demonstrations at universities to scientific research and to technological development.