Mobility programmes enlarge European HPCN research community

Barcelona, 25-11 -1996 More than threehundred European researchers have benefited from High Performance Computing (HPC) within the EC Fourth Framework Programme (1994-1998) thanks to the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR). This programme is a successor to the Human Capital and Mobility EC programme which ended in 1987 and was a pilot-scheme of the Second Framework Programme to make ease access of the researchers to Europe's large-scale research facilities.

CESCA-CEPBA in Spain, CINECA in Italy and EPCC in Great Britain are the three European supercomputing centres which provide to researchers on advanced computing infrastructure to implement their projects.

CESCA-CEPBA has enhanced, within the Access to Supercomputing Facilities for European Researchers project, the training and collaboration of a104 European scientists and engineers, most of them Chemists (36) and Computing researchers (30) from Italy, Germany and France.

CEPBA not only provides access to the resources of the centres but offers as well the necessary skills to select and evaluate the tools and the basic algorithms needed als to implement the fastest solutions.

CINECA , a consortium of 13 Italian universities, has already given 65 scientists - most of them from Chemistry and Human Sciences from Great Britain and Italy-, training, vector and parallel computing facilities, access to a scientific visualisation laboratory, on-line information service as well as the support of experts for the best use of the resources, within the Intensive Computing for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research of European Scientists project (ICARUS).

As for the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), it offers the same kind of facilities as the other two within a project named Training and Research on Advanced Computing Systems (TRACS). 144 researchers - most of them German and Italian - from disciplines as diverse as physics and music, have already taken advantage of HPC techniques there. This emphasises, no doubt, the wide applicability of High Performance Computing.

The projects of the three centres are open to both academic and industrial researchers. The best way to know how to access the facilities that they provide is to checkthe web page of each centre.

Training and Mobility of researchers encourages the creation of a Europe-wide research community by opening the services and knowledge of large-scale facilities to a larger group of users, who speed up the advances in many fields of Science and Technology and make, by the way, our life much better.

Anna Solana