Today, the University of Luxembourg announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) cloud computing infrastructure in order to accelerate strategic high-performance computing (HPC) research and development in Europe.
University of Luxembourg will be among the first European universities to provide research and development communities with access to compute environments that use an architecture similar to the European Processor Initiative (EPI), which will be the basis for Europe’s future exascale computing architecture.
Using Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton2 and Graviton3, the University of Luxembourg will make simulation capacity available to University researchers. This autumn, research projects will be selected from proposals submitted by University R&D teams.
As part of this project, AWS will provide cloud computing services to the University that will support the development, design, and testing of numerical codes (i.e., codes that use only digits, such as binary), which traditionally demands a lot of compute power. This will give researchers an accessible, easy-to-use, end-to-end environment in which they can validate their simulation codes on ARM64 architectures, including servers, personal computers, and Internet of Things (IoT).
After initial project selection by a steering committee that includes representatives from the University of Luxembourg and AWS, additional projects will be selected each quarter. Selections will be based on the University’s outlined research goals. Priority will be given to research carried out by the University of Luxembourg and its interdisciplinary research centers; however, based on available capacity and project qualifications, the initiative could extend to European industrial partners.
“Through this collaboration with AWS, we contribute to the preparation of the future European cloud computing infrastructure and enabling researchers in making impactful change starting now with high performance computing capacities”, said Prof. Pascal Bouvry, in charge of the University High Performance Computing.
“AWS is delighted to collaborate with the University of Luxembourg. We support the University’s offer to the research community by providing accessible cloud computing services that researchers can use as they design, develop, and test simulation codes to support Europe’s HPC ambitions,” said Mathieu Jeandron, Head of Solution Architecture, Benelux for World Wide Public Sector (WWPS) at AWS.
To help guide project submissions and provide information about funding and HPC on AWS, workshops will be offered as part of the project. For more information about this initiative as well as upcoming workshops, you can contact hpc-partnership@uni.lu