“Helios” and GÉANT connect at Europe’s biggest ICT conference

“Helios” ranks as one of the top supercomputers in the world. It is part of the Broader Approach, the fusion energy partnership between Europe and Japan, and is hosted in the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC) in Rokkasho. Its mission is to produce vast data sets in this field of energy and help scientists all over the world to develop components in very challenging environments as expected in DEMO, ITER’s follow-on project.

GÉANT is the world’s leading high-speed research and education network serving 50 million users in over 10,000 institutions across Europe. The project is currently offering extra band width to Helios so as to connect with scientists all over the world and push forward the frontiers of knowledge.

The partnership between the two was sealed earlier this year. They both enjoy an international outlook and have a clear commitment to public research and innovation. The perfect match seized the opportunity to participate to Europe’s biggest ICT conference, hosted in Vilnius under the auspices of the Lithuanian Presidency, in order to demonstrate the benefits of international cooperation and highlight the direct contribution of ICT in the shaping tomorrow’s energy mix. Parallel thematic sessions, networking events and a vibrant investors’ forum maintained the interest of nearly 5000 people from the ICT industry, SMEs and innovation centres eager to showcase their latest achievements.

During the conference we spoke to Susana Clement-Lorenzo, F4E’s responsible for IFERC who explained that “the collaboration with GÉANT and our participation to this event have revealed a new target audience interested in “Helios” purely from a technical perspective. They are impressed with its IT capacity and its potential contribution to applied research. For those interested in the field of fusion, I can say that the supercomputer is high on demand. In the last call for Helios, researchers requested three times more computer time than available.80% of the computer time is allocated to projects submitted to the calls jointly judged on their merit. The remaining 20% is evenly split between Europe and Japan. We plan to carry out further enhancements to the supercomputer’s operational system, and to offer more training courses in 2014 to prepare the scientific community for the next generation of supercomputers.”
 

Michael Enrico, Chief Technical Officer of DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe) a UK non-profit organisation operating GÉANT, was also there and explained to F4E News how DANTE came along. “Bilateral links in today’s information age are costly and inefficient. In 1993 we saw the opportunity to develop an operator connecting multiple national research networks in Europe. We have come a long ways since then and today GÉANT is a synonym to networking excellence. We are happy to support “Helios” because it is in line with our mission to connect innovators; it builds up our business portfolio by associating us with cutting edge energy research and last but not least, it is a part of ITER- the biggest international collaborative project in the field of energy. ”

To read more about the collaboration between F4E and GÉANT click here