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, Italy was elected Chair, with Anwar Osseyran of SURFsara, Netherlands elected as Vice-Chair.

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.

It is fair to say that things all now well on track with regards to the objective. 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, i.e. France, Germany, Italy and Spain), to 303 scientific and industrial projects from 38 countries. This figure in itself is probably more interesting – or more meaningful – than the sheer compounded power of the hardware infrastructure. And if for the 2010-2015 period the total funding of PRACE was somehow “limited” to € 530 M, the European HPC community has come to expect a larger envelope for the next five years, both because of the scale-up challenges ahead and the realization of the critical importance of supercomputing at political levels. The editorial team wishes the best of luck to PRACE’s new executive team.