SURFs is the National Supercomputing and e- Science Support Center in the Netherlands. Among SURF’s customers are all of the Dutch universities, a number of large research, educational and government institutions, and the business community. The mission of SURF is to support research in the Netherlands by the development and provision of advanced ICT infrastructure, services and expertise. SURF provides expertise and services in the areas of High Performance Computing, e-Science & Cloud Services, Data Services, Network support, and Visualisation. SURF hosts the large national infrastructure services, i.e. the Dutch national Supercomputer service (Bull bullx system, 481 Tflop/s which will be upgraded to some 1.5 Pflop/s by the end of 2014), the National Compute Cluster (Dell cluster, some 9000 cores, 158 Tflop/s), large data storage facilities and services and all important national grid services. This also includes a large part of the BiG Grid infrastructure (the Dutch e-Science grid that is a Tier-1 site for CERN LCG). SURF participates in a number of national and international HPC, e-science and grid activities. SURF is currently partner in the large European e-Infrastructure projects PRACE-2IP, PRACE-3IP, EUDAT, and Fortissimo. It has a long history and a proven track record in providing HPCN services to the Dutch research community. An important focus is on supporting users to enable grand challenge applications. SURF has built broad expertise in the implementation and e-science support of grid infrastructures for the scientific research community. SURF provides also HPC-Cloud and Hadoop services to support research.
SURF will be leading WP5: Usage/Operations. SURF has a long tradition in porting and scaling of applications on PRACE systems, and in performance modelling with relevant tools. In this role we have build a lot of know-how and skills that will be used for the benefit of this project. Scaling and porting real-life applications on the NEXT interconnect will generate tuned applications and feedback that will be used during the design stage of the interconnect. Our experience with HPC ecosystems will be used to test and provide feedback on the ecosystem design for the NEXT interconnect. SURF will perform tasks in WP2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 and provide deliverables in the form of reports and tuned applications.
Key Personnel
Mark Cole BSc MBCS – Started in 2016 at SURF as Community Manager for Public Private Partnerships and European projects. He is also responsible for product and service development of the SURF national expertise centre for Research Data Management (RDM) as well as product management of the SURF Research Cloud. Mark has worked as an IT Business Consultant for over 20 years delivering many projects with large multi-nationals such as Shell, Rabobank, Siemens, General Electric, ABN Amro and also the European Patent Office. He has lead multiple analytical investigations in order to provide strategic advice to C-Level management, and support regulatory requirements in the financial sector. In partnership with McKinsey & Co he was responsible for the setup and design of Workforce Analytics as a specialist function at the Rabobank.
Dr Nuno Ferreira – Consultant in the HPC Cloud group at SURF since 2016. He accumulated experience in Grid distributed environments while supporting a Structural Biology European Project (e-NMR) at Utrecht University. At the European Grid Instrastructure (EGI) he was a Community Officer, supporting Grid / Cloud activities at the National Grid Infrastructures and European Projects (EGI-InSPIRE, EGI-Engage, BioVeL). At SURF he continues to be involved in various projects, such as CompBioMed, ELIXIR, EOSCpilot and ALS MinE, by supporting Cloud and IT Service Management activities. Nuno holds a PhD in Biological Chemistry (Coimbra University, 2010).
Walter Lioen – Background in numerical mathematics (MSc) and worked from the mideighties as a scientific programmer on many different supercomputers. In 2007, he joined SURF as a senior HPC consultant where he became group leader of the supercomputing group in 2008. In 2016, he became manager of the compute services unit (supercomputing, cluster computing and visualization). Walter was involved in DEISA and is actively involved in PRACE.
Dr Marco Verdicchio – Studied chemistry at the Università degli Studi di Perugia from where, in 2012, he got a PhD in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry under a joint supervision programme between the University of Perugia (IT) and the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse (FR). In 2013, he joined the ENSIC (Nancy, FR) as a postdoctoral researcher in the field of combustion chemistry, and in 2014 he moved to the Chemical Sciences and Engineering division at the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) to work, as postdoctoral appointee, in the field of computational combustion and atmospheric chemistry. He joined SURF, as HPC consultant, in September 2016 and has been involved in the CompBioMed H2020-EU project since then.
Dr Narges Zarrabi – Consultant in the data services group at SURF. She holds a PhD in Computational Science from University of Amsterdam (2013). Her PhD research was about modeling and simulation of infectious disease using agent-based models and complex networks. During this time she contributed to different European projects such as ViroLab and DynaNets.