Next week the attention of many in the high performance computing (HPC) community will be focused on Europe when the 27th annual International Supercomputer Conference convenes June 17-21 in Hamburg.  The conference expects record-breaking attendance this year with about 2400 participants attending the five-day technical program and visiting exhibits from leading research centers and vendors.

But as important as ISC’12 is to the HPC community, it’s not the only game in town.  

Two weeks later, on June 27-28 in northern France, TERATEC Forum 2012 will take place. Like ISC, its theme, “Design by Simulation,” also embraces HPC, but with a highly practical bent.    

On Wednesday, June 27, the plenary sessions will be dedicated to industrial strategies and public policies on HPC and illustrate the increasing variety of applications for the technology.  The conference will bring together leading technology providers and industrial users as well as highly innovative small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Companies such as Arkema, Kalray, Schlumberger, Tata, and Xyratex will be in attendance.

Public officials will also be participating, including Robert Madelin, Director General, Directorate‐General for Information Society and Media of the European Commission, and Nelson Maculan, former Education Minister of Brazil and Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

The day will conclude with the award ceremony of the 2012 Bull‐Joseph Fourier Prize, which recognizes an individual or a team for their work in the field of application parallelization on traditional or hybrid architectures, done in a public or private laboratory.

 On Thursday, the emphasis on high performance modeling and simulation will continue in the form of workshops and presentations.  They will range from design to end use and include such topics as new architectures, parallel programming, systems performance, and new concepts in modeling and simulation.
 
Specific workshops include:
•    Complex Systems Numerical Design
•    Exascale Challenges
•    Visualization, optimization and performance
•    Green Computing Centers
•    Data Deluge(s)

To give you a feel for the depth of technical program, particularly as it applies to advanced manufacturing, here are summaries of two of the presentations.

The first features Stephanie Gottlib-Zeh, Geoscience & Drilling advisor for Schlumberger.  In her session summary she writes:
The world’s energy demand will over the next 20-30 years be about 30 percent higher in 2040 compared to 2010. All prognosis forecasts that Oil and Gas, will continue to provide the majority of the demand. The new demand comes mainly from the non OECD countries, where the energy demand will grow by close to 60 %.

Meeting energy needs over time – safely and with minimal environmental impact, is vital, and computational capabilities are a big part of those efforts.   For example, new imaging techniques are required to find oil and gas deposits in complex geological areas. More complex and higher fidelity modeling of reservoirs are needed in order to extract the maximum resources from the prospects. Real time well placement using complex 3D modeling of extended horizontal wells will be necessary in order to access resources and it will enable access to resources with minimal environmental footprint.  

The first part of this talk gives an overview of the business and geopolitical drives of the industry, followed with the critical contribution of computation in the quest for secure supply of energy.

In another interesting session, David Silagy & Walid Zerguine from Arkema, the French chemical industry leader, will discuss numerical modeling, the major asset for innovative chemistry and polymers.  

They state that Arkema’s innovative strategy focuses on sustainable development in fields such as new energy, biobased raw materials, energy storage or lightweight materials. Numerical modeling enables Arkema to shorten innovation cycle time and to bring enhanced customer service. It is used at several scales, starting from microscopic approach, to predict physical properties and thermodynamic behavior of new species, reaching the mesoscopic scale to optimize pilot steps and finally going to macroscopic approach to virtually design new materials or processes.

The complexity of the physical and chemical process taking place in the chemical industry (non Newtonian fluids, composite materials, interfacial phenomena, reactive media and multiphase media) limits the accuracy of the current numerical simulations. Access to significant CPU resources becomes a major challenge to perform predictive modeling.

The present lecture illustrates practical usage of numerical modeling in domains such as in-line polymerization process control, new polymeric materials eco-design or hydrodynamics modeling in stirring vessels. The point of view of a chemical company with respect to the remaining challenges and perspectives in the field of numerical modeling will be discussed.

Meeting the Computing Needs of the SMEs
On Thursday afternoon, a special session will be dedicated to the needs of SMEs covering such topics as access to computing power and high‐level expertise, development of platform‐services, financing, training, collaborative research programs, relationship with large industrial groups, etc. The session will include a presentation of the Teratec Campus and of the programs managed by the Essonne Chamber of Trade and Industry to welcome them and support their development.

During the conference there will be an exhibition of around sixty booths covering the whole HPC industry. Systems manufacturers and software vendors, integrators and distributors, service providers, academic and laboratory researchers, public and private sector developers will present their latest HPC innovations.

TERATEC is located at Essonne at Bruyères le Châtel and is a member of the "SYSTEMATIC Paris‐Region" competitiveness cluster.  

If your interested in HPC and its application to practical matters such as the fast-growing world of digital manufacturing, modeling and simulation, perhaps France and the TERATEC Forum 2012 should take a top spot on your list of places to go and things to do this summer.

For more information: http://www.teratec.eu/gb/forum/index.html