PDC-ENCCS Collaboration Seeking Industry Partner

As part of the EuroCC project, which leads the initiative to form and coordinate competence centres in high-performance computing (HPC) across Europe, the EuroCC National Competence Centre Sweden (ENCCS) provides free high- performance computing training and support for industry, academia and public administration. ENCSS is hosted by the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and Linköping University with funding coming from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Innovation Agency (Vinnova).

Since May 2023, PDC and ENCCS have been investigating whether they could work together to improve the advanced HPC training they each offer, especially in terms of supporting industry in its use of HPC resources. In June this year, ENCCS and PDC proposed a strategic collaboration focusing on supporting business HPC users and offering more advanced types of training tailored to industry research needs. The decision to proceed with the collaboration was made in August.

PDC offers HPC access to business customers according to a pay-per-use model (see www.pdc.kth.se/hpc-services/prices-for-using-pdc-resources-1.932289 ). Compared to standard cloud computing offerings for industry, using the HPC resources at PDC that are dedicated for industry is generally cheaper, since PDC’s pricing reflects the actual mean cost and energy consumption of using the resources. (As part of a government agency, PDC does not make any profit, nor is it allowed to subsidise costs.) The goal of the PDC pricing model has always been to be easy to understand, predictable and without any hidden costs.

PDC aims to foster the best possible climate to enable top-of-the-line industrial research and development (R&D) while, at the same time, working together with our industrial partners to increase their and our competence in leading industrial software and to keep each other updated on trends, as well as developing future use cases and associated requirements. Current business collaborators appreciate the high level of professional competence at PDC, both when it comes to application software and making the best possible use of the underlying hardware. Some of our industrial collaborators have worked for years on different generations of PDC’s resources building up mutual trust. Often, the allocated resources at PDC are like a flexible extension of the company’s resources as they are used for burst-type computing when in-house resources reach their limits ahead of critical deadlines, but they are also used when developing and testing completely new R&D scenarios and simulations further away from regular day-to-day production and standard R&D. Here the usage of the Dardel resources provides a new sense of freedom and the possibility to explore new, future-relevant research areas without disturbing the core business computational tasks.

Another selling factor for choosing PDC, which has gained more weight recently, is the drive towards sustainability in business. PDC has been a trail-blazer in re-using heat from supercomputers since 2009. Instead of using about 30% more energy (and money) to cool the Dardel systems, both the air and liquids in the system are cooled down via heat exchangers and connected to the KTH heat pump (which was installed in 2015) in order to heat the surrounding KTH campus buildings. Together with KTH embracing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, PDC’s users can sleep soundly knowing that 100% of the electricity that PDC uses is from renewable sources, and thus all businesses buying computing time from PDC already fulfil future industry requirements on sustainability. The Dardel GPU partition is seventeenth in the world on the November 2024 Green500 list of the most energy-efficient systems and is the highest-ranked system in Sweden on the list.

ENCCS does a marvellous job of supporting Swedish industry, especially in onboarding newcomers and assisting them in making efficient use of the available EuroHPC top-tier computational resources. ENCCS offers free HPC consultancy and training, assistance in writing proposals to apply for access to EuroHPC systems and in-depth support for proof-of-concept projects. As a one-stop shop for HPC in Sweden, ENCCS also connects companies to HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) service providers and funding agencies in the EuroHPC ecosystem. Industry researchers can use EuroHPC resources free of charge for open science after application. However, for computational work which cannot be classified as open science or where it is crucial to have a guarantee of being able to continue using the computational resource for the full lifetime of a particular research project, PDC may be the better alternative.

As mentioned in the article about “ENCCS news” , PDC and ENCSS are looking for an industrial partner for an in-depth pilot project. The idea of the pilot is for the company to undertake a research project where PDC and ENCCS provide free HPC resources and also support (for example, from PDC/ENCCS research software engineers and application experts) to use those HPC resources. At the same time, the company will assist PDC and ENCCS to determine how the HPC services that they currently offer to support industry research could best be developed to meet the current and ever-evolving needs of industry. If your company is interested in this exciting opportunity, please contact PDC and ENCCS at info@enccs.se  and mention that you are interested in the pilot project.