New Global Initiative Promotes International HPC Collaboration

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to foster international collaboration among members of the supercomputing community, “including graduate students, post-docs, and early-career faculty members, for collaborative research and development of new computing and analysis tools.”
The new project, known as the Global Initiative to Enhance @scale and Distributed Computing Analysis Technologies (GECAT), is part of the NCSA’s Blue Waters project, which provides access to the massive Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA’s University of Illinois headquarters.
According to the press release, GECAT will allow NCSA to “deepen and extend its current international collaborations,” including its work with Argonne National Laboratory, France’s INRIA, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Germany’s Julich Supercomputing Center, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Korean Institute of Science and Technology Information.
The announcement lists several areas of emphasis, including performance issues for extreme scale, storage and management of Big Data, fault tolerance, visualization, and interconnect network topology.