TAU student wins spot in PRACE Summer of HPC

A Tel Aviv University graduate student, Mordechai (Moti) Butrashvily, has won a coveted spot in the Summer of HPC (High Performance Computing) Program run by PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). After completing orientation with all the participants in Edinburgh, Butrashvily arrived at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen where he will work on state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth’s past, present, and future climate states. Moti is a student in the Department of Geophysical, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Tel Aviv University’s Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences.

The Summer of HPC program offers undergraduate and junior postgraduate university students the opportunity to spend two months of the summer at an HPC center in a PRACE partner country. The Summer of HPC encourages them in their path to become the next generation of supercomputer users and students. Moti is one of 24 participants handpicked from a field of over 200 applicants.

The Project in Question

The project Moti is working on will use GP-GPU to answer the increasing computational demand of the Community Earth System Model (CESM). The CESM is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer climate simulations. In order to improve the simulations, the resolution and complexity of the model are constantly increased, which in turn increases the computational demand of the model. Moti’s team will analyze CCSM4 and identify functions that may benefit from GP-GPU execution and then port these functions to GP-GPU.

"I was very pleased to be selected for this project in particular, since it is so relevant to my graduate work in geophysics from both a technical and scientific perspective,” says Moti. “I am grateful for this incredible experience and chance to meet and collaborate with so many promising young scientists. But no less important, I am really honored to represent Israel, the university, and Israeli science in general – in such a distinguished group.”

International Collaboration

Israel is now one of the 25 countries who collaborate in the PRACE consortium. Membership affords Israeli researchers, in academia and industry, free access to this multimillion Euro resource and access to programs such the Summer of HPC. PRACE supercomputers are ranked among the fastest in the world and cost in excess of €400 million, funded by the European Union.

The PRACE Research Infrastructure is open to Israeli research and projects deemed to have significant European and international impact. Projects are reviewed via a bi-annual call for proposals and evaluated by leading scientists and engineers in a peer-review process.

The 2014 PRACE Winter School will be held on the Tel Aviv University campus, hosted by the Inter-University Computation Center. The PRACE seasonal school offers a unique two-part program. In addition to classical hands-on training, the program includes a mini-workshop on “The Future of HPC: Israeli Innovation”, where Israeli companies and researchers who are developing future HPC technologies will be showcased. The hands-on training will focus on an introductory workshop on how to use PRACE resources. The experience Butrashvily gains in Copenhagen this summer will also be a welcome addition to the Seasonal School program and he plans on assisting as a mentor.