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Discover the fascinating applications of supercomputing into business & research! Workshop animated by EuroCC Luxembourg: the national HPC competence center. Join us the first day of ICT Spring at 4PM in workshop room 2, Luxexpo The Box, Luxembourg!

High-performance computing (HPC), also known as supercomputing, is an innovation accelerator that drives significant financial returns for companies in different sectors. HPC can reduce the costs of company’s R&D process thanks to simulations and virtual prototyping, thereby reducing also the time to market. HPC is particularly useful for performing simulations that require high-resolution results in order to be able to look into the granularity of large and complex problems with many parameter conditions to tune at the same time. HPC has also a big value added when used for big data analytics and training of artificial intelligence algorithms with millions of data points. This kind of endeavours would take very long time to be performed, or sometimes simply cannot be performed, on common laptops or computer desk workstations. Instead, HPC is able to analyse data with unmatched speed and impressive precision. These two distinctive features allow to considerably reducing the time to train complex AI algorithms or to create large-scale simulations on which to perform stress tests. For more examples of HPC use cases by sector, see the infographic.
 

Supercomputing is not only for big companies and research institutes, but also for small and medium enterprises, as the extended repository of success stories developed by the European project Fortissimo4EuroHPC demonstrates (https://www.ff4eurohpc.eu/en/success-stories/). Nevertheless, there is not one single metric that can be used across all sectors to measure the benefits of HPC. The reasons for using supercomputing tend to be individual for each organisation and related to its strategic priorities. HPC can already today be an essential driver of business and research competitiveness, and will be increasingly important in the future, as the amount of data available doubles every two years and business that want to stay competitive cannot ignore this trend. 

There is a great potential for incorporating the exploitation of supercomputing techniques into the business models of many companies. A study by Hyperion Research [1] published in November 2020 analyses 763 HPC projects from academia, government and industrial sectors. The study finds that high performance computing generates $47 in profit/cost savings for every dollar of investment in HPC systems. The Luxembourg government heavily invested into HPC infrastructure in order to enable businesses and research to flourish by using these cutting-edge technologies. 

However, HPC is still very little used in the private sector, often due to a lack of the necessary skills and expertise to scale numerical simulations or to perform big data analytics on large computing systems such as HPC, which may be intimidating at first sight. In order to fill this gap, the national competence center in High-Performance Computing has been set up. The HPC competence centre mission is to guide unexperienced users into the supercomputing world (sector use cases, trainings, funding opportunities, partner search, project implementation, libraries, tools, codes, optimization of HPC resources, etc…) and reinforce experienced users with tools to upskill their knowledge. The HPC competence centre supports companies & researchers at different HPC maturity stages. 
Are you curious to discover if supercomputing is for you? Then, don’t wait anymore and join us on June 30th at 4PM in workshop room 2, Luxexpo The Box, Luxembourg! It will be interactive & fun with the quiz we prepared for you. The most correct answers to our live quiz during the workshop will have the chance to win a guided visit to MeluXina supercomputer!

  [1]Source: Hyperion Research “HPC Investments Bring High Returns”: https://www.hpcuserforum.com/ROI/

Photo credit: LuxProvide