Sanzio Bassini elected Chair of the PRACE Council

At the occasion of the 13th Council Meeting of PRACE – the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe – which was held on 3 and 4 June 2014 in Athens, Greece, Sanzio Bassini of CINECA was elected Chair, with Anwar Osseyran of SurfSARA, Netherlands elected as Vice-Chair. 

Sergio Bernardi (Cineca) is member of the Board of the Council.
Francesca Garofalo (Cineca) is the Italian representative in the PRACE Council.

Sanzio Bassini will take over from Catherine Rivière of GENCI, France, who held the position of Council Chair since 2012. “I am looking forward to taking up this task and guiding PRACE into the next stage of its existence to let PRACE 2.0 become solid and concrete. There are many challenges ahead, but I am confident that we can make PRACE grow and prosper, the foundations for PRACE 2.0 having been laid by my predecessors,” said Sanzio Bassini in reaction to his election.

“Supercomputers are part of the great human adventure and my dream for PRACE has always been to make it a sustainable and world-leading research infrastructure,” said Catherine Rivière, “and PRACE 2.0 will bring that dream one step closer to reality,” she added.

Since 2010 PRACE has allocated over 8 billion core hours on 6 world-class machines with a total capacity of nearly 15 Petaflops/s, hosted in 4 EU Member States (the PRACE Hosting Members France, Germany, Italy and Spain), to 303 scientific and industrial projects from 38 countries. The total funding of PRACE amounts to € 530 million over 5 years (2010 – 2015). Around 35% of PRACE access is given to non-hosting and non-EU countries, and awarded projects come from a diverse group of scientific and industrial domains.

The PRACE Council is the deliberative body of the Association and decides on all matters of the Association. It is composed of one representative from each Member. Depending on the nature of the decisions to be taken, different voting rules apply. As a general rule, decisions of a purely scientific nature are subject to majority vote, while decisions related to provisioning and usage of funding and resources require a qualified majority based on partner contributions. All other decisions require a double majority of members and contributions, apart from a small number of issues that imply changes of the contract of the Association which require unanimity. More information on the bodies of PRACE can be found here

About PRACE 

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 4 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements RI-283493 and RI-312763.

In the picture: L-R: Anwar Osseyran (Vice-Chair), Sanzio Bassini (newly elected Chair of the PRACE Council), Catherine Rivière (outgoing Chair of the PRACE Council), Sergi Girona, (Chair of the Board of Directors), Kenneth Ruud (Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee).