Due to an already very busy June, the Teratec Forum has been shifted by one week this year and will hold its 9th edition on July 1st and 2nd. An excellent way to prepare for vacation… with a mindful of new ideas and perspectives!

Here’s the Forum’s full program which, as usual, is organized in plenary sessions on the first day and technical workshops on the second, around an exhibition where the major players in the HPC market will present their latest innovations (should we add that we’ll be there as well?).

The plenary sessions on Tuesday, July 1st, will focus on the strategic and innovative role of supercomputing and simulation in business and governmental organizations, including presentations by AIRBUS, ETP4HPC, the Square Kilometre Array project, Ubercloud (of which your favorite newsource has already devoted extensive coverage), and DISTENE. Let’s also not forget the presence of Arnaud Montebourg, the French Minister of Industrial Renewal, who will detail the stakes and objectives of the Supercomputers plan, one of 34 sector-based initiatives of the New Face of Industry announced by the French government in September 2013.

The eight technical workshops on day two, varied as always, will be technology- or practice-oriented with experts presenting state of the art as well as new areas of HPC applications. The four Technology workshops will address the following topics:

  • HPC & Big data applications and solution architectures: evolution and convergence – Clarifications on the perspectives and state of the art of hardware and software platforms adapted to the exploitation and monetization of large volumes of complex data.

  • Complex Systems Numerical Design and Optimization: state-of-the-art and challenges – Highlighting the principal barriers for optimized design: major barriers and state of the art methods to remove them.

  • Scientific Computing & Open Source: industrial practices for open source software – Testimonials from users and solution providers for a broad overview of open source practices in industrial fields such as aerospace, aeronautics, energy, medicine, and microelectronics.

  • HPC & Big Data: software components and tools – State of the art and perspectives on power and energy optimization, efficient programming and run-time execution, resilience and fault-tolerance.

The Practice oriented workshops will focus on scientific advances in traditional HPC domains and future advances:

  • Material simulation: new materials, usage, and durability – By the many degrees of freedom required to describe them, the development of materials is a heavy consumer of computing power. This is why adapting code to new-generation (Exascale) machines is a major challenge for the future.

  • Digital technologies for plants – Issues and problems related to agriculture in the broadest sense, tools and methods for simulation of plant growth and decision tools, processing technologies for imagery data and major applications in seeds and food processing.

  • HPC and Healthcare: from therapeutic research to personalized medicine – Healthcare also benefits from the progress of modeling and computing technologies. With the increased capacity and lower costs of supercomputing, we are now capable of modeling more physico-chemical and physiological phenomena, which will eventually allow us to provide increasingly personalized medical care.

  • Modeling and simulating urban systems – Why and how software tools for modeling and simulation, as well as for governing and managing urban systems, create an opportunity to analyze and optimize the way urban systems work as a whole, and to enable city leaders to make enlightened decisions

The editorial team will follow all of these sessions. Rendez-vous the 1st and 2nd of July at the Ecole Polytechnique campus in Palaiseau.