Thomas Schulthess

Modern Supercomputing and extreme-scale data infrastructures explained

Information and communication technologies are evolving rapidly and with it the way compute and data infrastructures are provisioned. Science in the digital age requires that compute and data services converge, and at all scales. While Europe is ramping up its own supercomputing agenda with the EuroHPC initiative and is in the process of establishing the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the small group of data centers that are organized within the HBP in the Fenix consortium, have taken a leading role in developing services that integrate supercomputing and extreme-scale data. This work is beginning to have impact outside of the HBP and can provide a basis for developing service-oriented architectures for the European Data Infrastructure that underpins the EOSC and EuroHPC. I will review recent progress of the Fenix infrastructure as well as its impact outside HBP. Furthermore, I will discuss some programmatic and institutional challenges we are facing.

Short CV

Thomas Schulthess is Professor of Computational Physics at ETH Zurich and Director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) since 2008. He studied physics at ETH Zurich and earned his doctorate in 1994 with a thesis on surface physics, in which he combined experiment and supercomputing-based simulations. He subsequently continued his research in the USA, working on the DARPA-funded spintronics project and spending more than 10 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), from where he returned to Switzerland in 2008. Thomas led the teams that won the ACM Gordon Bell Prizes in 2008 and 2009 with the first production-level applications sustaining a petaflops on ORNL’s first peta-scale supercomputers. In the past 10 years, as director of CSCS that hosts the operational weather forecasting systems of MeteoSwiss, Thomas took interest in developing software systems for weather and climate simulations, as wells a design of computing systems for numerical weather prediction. Under his leadership, CSCS was the first center in Europe that deployed a productive GPU-accelerated supercomputing system in 2013, and co-designed with Cray, NVIDIA and MeteoSwiss the first GPU-based weather forecasting system that has been deployed in 2015, and since spring 2016 is running MeteoSwiss’ new COSMO-NEXT model at 1km horizontal resolution. For this work CSCS and MeteoSwiss received the 2016 Swiss ICT Award for Outstanding IT-Based Projects and Services.