 We're back at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, winding down day four of this conference. I'm Paul Gillan, my co-host, Dave Nicholson. We've been talking Supercomputing all week, and you hear a lot about what's going on in the United States, what's going on in China, Japan. What we haven't talked a lot about is what's going on in Europe. And did you know that two of the top five supercomputers in the world are actually from European countries? Well, our guest has a lot to do with that. Florian Behrich, I hope I pronounced that correctly. My German is not my strength, is the Operations Director for PRACE, AISBL. And let's start with that. What is PRACE? So, hello, and thank you for the invitation. I'm Florian, and PRACE is a partnership for advanced computing in Europe. It's a non-profit association with the seat in Brussels and Belgium. And we have 24 members. These are representatives from different European countries dealing with high-performance computing at their place. And so far, we provided the resources for our European research communities, but this changed in the last year with Oro HPC Joint Undertaking, who put a lot of funding in high-performance computing and co-funded five PETA scale and three pre-access scale systems. And two of the pre-access scale systems you mentioned already, this is Lumi in Finland and Leonardo in Bologna in Italy, who are in the place three and four at the top 500 list. So why is it important that Europe be in the top list of supercomputer makers? I think Europe needs to keep pace with the rest of the world. And simulation science is a key technology for the society. And we saw this very recently with the pandemic, with the COVID. We were able to help the research communities to find very quickly vaccines and to understand how the virus spread around the world. And all this knowledge is important to serve society. Or another example is climate change. With these new systems, we will be able to predict more precise the changes in the future. So the more compute power you have, the smaller the grit and the resolution you can choose. And the lower the error will be for the future. So these are, I think, these systems, the big challenges we face can be addressed. This is the climate change, energy, food supply, security. Who are your members? Do they come from businesses? Do they come from research, government, all of the above? Yeah, our members are public organization, universities, research centers, compute sites as a data centers, but public institutions. And we provide these services for free via peer review process with excellence as the most important criteria to the research community for free. So 40 years ago, when the idea of an EU, and maybe I'm getting the dates a little bit wrong, when it was just an idea and the idea of a common currency, reducing friction between borders to create a trading zone, there was a lot of focus there. Fast forward to today, would you say that these efforts in supercomputing, would they be possible if there were not an EU superstructure? No, I would say this would not be possible in this extent. I think when the European initiatives are needed and the European Commission is supporting these initiatives very well, and before praise, for instance, 2008, there were research centers and data centers operating high performance computing systems, but they were not talking to each other. So it was an isolated place, created a community of these operation sites and facilitated the exchange between them and also enabled to align investments and to get the most out of the available funding. And also at this time, and still today, for one single country in Europe, it's very hard to provide all the different architectures needed for all the different kind of research communities and applications if you want to offer always the latest technologies. So this is really hardly possible. So with this joint action and opening the resources for other research groups from other countries, we were able to get access to the latest technology for different communities at any given time. So the fact that the two systems that you mentioned are physically located in Finland and in Italy, if you were to walk into one of those facilities and meet the people that are there, they're not just Finns in Finland and Italians in Italy. This is very much a European effort. So in that sense, the geography is sort of abstracted. And the issues of sovereignty that might take place in the private sector don't exist. Or are there issues with what are the requirements for a researcher to have access to a system in Finland versus a system in Italy? If you've got a EU passport, are you good to go? I think you're good to go. But a EU passport, now it becomes complicated and political. It's very much, if we talk about the recent systems. First, let me start a praise. Praise was inclusive. And there was no any constraints as even we had users from US, Australia, we wanted just to support excellence in science. And we did not look at the nationality of the organization of the PI and so on. There were quotas, but these quotas were very generously interpreted. So now with our HPC trying undertaking, it's a question from what European funds these systems were procured. And if a country, a European country, are associated to these funding, the researchers also have access to these systems. And this addresses basically UK and Switzerland, which are not in the European Union. But they were associated to the Horizon 2020 research framework. And though they can access the systems now available, Lumi and Leonardo and the petascale system as well. How this will develop in the future, I don't know. It depends to which research framework they will be associated or not. What are the outputs of your work at praise? Are they reference designs? Is it actual semiconductor hardware? Is it research? What do you produce? So the application we run or the simulation we run cover all different scientific domains. So it's science. But also we have industrial-led projects with more application-oriented targets. Aerodynamics, for instance, for cars or planes or something like this. But also fundamental science like the physical, elementary physics particles, for instance, or climate change, biology, drug design, protein crystallography, all these things. Can businesses be involved in what you do? Can they purchase your research? Do they contribute to their? I'm sure there are many technology firms in Europe that would like to be involved. So this involving industry, so our calls are open. And if they want to do open R&D, they are invited to submit also proposals that will be evaluated. And if this is qualifying, they will get the access and they can do their jobs and simulations. It's a little bit more tricky if it's in production. They use these resources for their business and do not publish the results. There are some probably more sites who are able to deal with these requests. Some are more dominant than others. But this is on a smaller scale, definitely. What does the future hold? Are there other countries who will be joining the effort? Other institutions? Do you plan to expand your scope? Well, I think Euro-HPC join undertaking with 36 member states is quite, covers already, even more than Europe. And yeah, clearly, if there are other states interested to join, there is no limitation. Also, the focus lies on the European area and union. When you interact with colleagues from North America, do you feel that there is a sort of European flavor to supercomputing that is different? Or are we so globally entwined? So research is not national. It's not European. It's international. This is also clearly very clear. And we have a longstanding collaboration with our US colleagues and also with Japan and South Africa and Canada. And when COVID hit the world, we were able, within two weeks, to establish regular seminars inviting US and European colleagues to talk to each other and exchange the results and find new collaboration and to boost the research activities. And I have other examples as well. So when we already did the joint calls, US exceed and in Europe praise. And it was a very interesting experience. So we received applications from different communities and we decided that we will review this on our side on European experts and US did it in US with their experts. And you can guess what the result was at the meeting when we compared our results. It was matching one by one. It was exactly the same result. It's refreshing to hear a story of global collaboration where people are getting along and making meaningful progress. I have to point out, you did not mention China as a country you're collaborating with. Is that intentional? Well, with China, definitely we have less links and collaborations. Also, it's also existing. There was an initiative to look at the development of the technologies and the group meet on a regular basis. And there were also Chinese colleagues involved. It's on a lower level. But conversations are occurring. We're out of time. Florian Beberich, Operations Director of PRACE, European Supercomputing Collaborative. Thank you so much for being with us. I'm always impressed when people come on the Cube and submit to an interview in a language that is not their first language. Yeah, absolutely. You're so brave to do that. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. We'll be right back after this break from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas.