Esprit PCI-PACOS projects show great results

Barcelona, 23-10 -1996 The final meeting of the Esprit project PCI-PACOS was held last September in the Polytechnical University of Catalonia (UPC). PACOS focused on HPC applications and on Spanish and Italian industry. Diverse company teams, in charge of different subprojects, made presentations of their progress of programmes developed thanks to the PACOS initiative. Tom B. Clausen, the EC Officer responsible for PCI Management, assisted the meeting as a guest and made an optimistic assessment of the results which Spanish Small and Medium Enterprises have obtained through parallel computing.

The PCI (Parallel Computing Initiative) Esprit project was launched in June 1994 with the objective of increasing the awareness of High Performance Computing (HPC) technology in Spanish and Italian industries. It was a late Esprit III project with Esprit IV objectives and criteria. The mechanism to achieve these goals consisted of setting up several small subprojects that would prove the potential improvements in competitiveness which could be got through the use of HPC technology. The subprojects were gathered in two clusters: PACOS for the Spanish branch and CAPRI for the Italian one. Each branch had a manager, as well as an institution in charge of the coordination and suitable progress of its assigned subprojects. PCI-PACOS was managed by CEPBA (European Centre for Parallelism of Barcelona) and PCI-CAPRI by Ente per le Nuove tecnologie, l'Energia e l'Ambiente - ENEA .

There is a WWW site of the Spanish PCI project which describes the global structure and achievements of the PACOS cluster. This web provides information about the initial problem which motivated the project, the objectives achieved on every subproject, the partners, a technical description and the way the parallel code is being exploited.

Further, in the middle of November, CEPBA will release a booklet on this project. The issues described in this publication are representative and valid for many industries, specially for SMEs which will identify many of their situations and concerns. It is our objective to introduce how the 8 subprojects selected by the European Comission for funding focused on key issues and tried to improve their situation. If you are interested in getting a copy of the booklet you can contact the CEPBA by telephone (+34-3-4017178) or e-mail.

Anna Solana