SCA21

SupercomputingAsia 2021 (SCA21) wraps up successful first virtual conference and exhibition

More than 1000 registered partners, speakers, sponsors and participants from across 30 countries and organisations participated in the SCA conference series’ first fully virtual conference and exhibition. With the theme “Supercomputing in the New Norm - Adapting to COVID-19 and beyond”, the three-day virtual event was co-organised by HPC centres from Singapore, Japan and Australia. The conference included presentations about the latest innovations and developments in the HPC arena from across the Asian region, and globally.

SCA21 saw an MOU between HPC centres from Finland’s CSC-IT Centre for Science and Singapore entities (NSCC, SingAREN and QEP, NUS) to explore new network links, better data transfer security, green data centres, and collaboration in other key HPC areas like capability and talent development.

The Asia Pacific Research Platform session at SCA21 presented updates from a number of partners including Jeonghoon Moon (KISTI, Korea), Joe Mambretti (Northwestern University, US), Cees de Laat (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Rod Wilson (Ciena Corporation), Kevin Sale (KAUST, Saudi Arabia), Andrew Howard (NCI, Australia) and Alvin Chiam (NSCC, Singapore). Dr Larry Smarr from University of California San Diego, US also presented a Plenary talk about the Pacific Research Platform as a high-bandwidth distributed supercomputer.

The leaders of HPC centres from Japan, Australia, Singapore, Thailand and Finland discussed the opportunities and challenges that each faced in designing and operating HPC centres, and shared best practices for running HPC centres of the future at SCA’s inaugural HPC Centre Leaders Forum. The panellists included Finland’s CSC, which manages the development of Europe’s most powerful pre-exascale supercomputer, the soon-to-be operational LUMI, and Japan’s RIKEN-CCS, which developed Fugaku, currently the world’s Number One ranked supercomputer according to the TOP500 supercomputer list.

Key opinion leaders also came together at SCA21 to discuss greater cooperation via various HPC initiatives and collaborations at the first ever EU-ASEAN-Japan Symposium including capability building, talent development and HPC skill capacity building for the ASEAN HPC community. These initiatives included programmes like the Enhanced Regional EU-ASEAN Dialogue Instrument (E-READI) and the organisation of a virtual HPC school by Thailand.

For more information on SupercomputingAsia, please visit www.sc-asia.org.