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SparCity Project

SparCity Coordinator, Dr. Didem Unat, is the 2021 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award winner!

Recognized for her innovative work in the field of programming models for data locality in HPC, Dr. Didem Unat received the SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award for 2021!

The Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award is unique in recognizing mid-career women in the technical and high performance computing communities. The award is presented every two years, recognizing the candidate’s impact on her chosen field as indicated by early career achievements, and her commitment to growing our community through service and mentorship.

“I am so pleased that Dr. Unat has been selected to receive the SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award,” commented Dr. Cristina Beldica, Chair of the EWLTC Committee, and director of HPC software development at Intel Corporation. “Dr. Unat’s rigorous technical work has directly impacted the productivity of application scientists. This is critical not only for high performance computing, but science in general. Prof. Unat is the first recipient of this award outside the US, reaffirming SIGHPC’s commitment to inspire and grow the HPC community globally, and to increase women’s participation in HPC. With leaders like Dr. Unat, the future of our field is in good hands.”

“It is such an honor to receive this award and be recognized by ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader In Technical Computing. I would like to thank my mentors, colleagues and my students who help me build my career.” said Dr. Didem on her Twitter.

Join us congratulating our coordinator and wish her continued success!

Read more here: https://www.sighpc.org/for-your-career/emerging-woman-leader-in-technical-computing-award/2021-ewltc-award-winner.

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Activities SparCity Project

First Technical Meeting

On 3rd May, our first Technical Meeting was held online with 19 participants including PIs, postdocs, PhD students and staff administrative from all partners. In this meeting, we heard from INESC-ID, Koç University and Simula about their ongoing work related to the SparCity project. In the next technical meeting, GraphCore, Sabanci and LMU will present their lines of research.

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Press Release SparCity Project

SparCity: the new collaborative project to create a supercomputing framework

  • SparCity, a new EuroHPC Joint Undertaking project, was launched
  • The project aims to build a sustainable exascale ecosystem and increasing Europe’s competitiveness
  • The project involves six player organisations in the area of high-performance computing from Germany, Norway, Portugal and Turkey

Recently funded by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the highly ranked SparCity just launched. With three years of duration and a total budget of 2.6M€, this collaborative project between 6 partners in 4 countries aims to build a sustainable exascale ecosystem and increase Europe’s competitiveness.

The main goal of SparCity is to create a supercomputing framework that will provide efficient algorithms and coherent tools specifically designed for maximising the performance and energy efficiency of sparse computations on emerging High Performance Computing systems, while also opening up new usage areas for sparse computations in data analytics and deep learning.

“When talking about sparse computations, people think of scientific applications, finite element methods, mesh computation, etc. However, this project will also open up new usage areas for sparse computation, including data analytics and deep learning. That is why it is a very impactful project.” says Dr Didem Unat, the coordinator of SparCity at Koç University.

To demonstrate the effectiveness, societal impact, and usability of the framework, the SparCity project will enhance the computing scale and energy efficiency of four challenging real-life applications that come from drastically different domains, namely, computational cardiology, social networks, bioinformatics and autonomous driving. By targeting this collection of challenging applications, SparCity will develop world-class, extreme-scale and energy-efficient HPC technologies.

SparCity involves partnerships with Sabanci Universitesi (Turkey), Simula Research Laboratory (Norway), INESC-ID (Portugal), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (Germany) and Graphcore (Norway), with the coordination of Koç University (Turkey).

“It is thus a great opportunity for researchers at Simula to collaborate with internationally leading experts, through these EuroHPC projects, to bring innovative use of HPC to real-world applications.” says Professor Xing Cai, head of the High Performance Computing department at Simula.

This is an excellent chance for my team at Sabancı University to share our expertise on HPC and work with great researchers on a challenging project which will hopefully change the way we handle extreme-scale problems using sparse data.” says Dr. Kamer Kaya, from Sabancı University.

Graphcore is committed to enabling next-generation techniques in AI compute, including innovative approaches to sparsity. Putting new hardware and software tools into the hands of researchers through the SparCity initiative will drive a virtuous cycle of discovery and deployment throughout Europe.” says Ola Tørudbakken, GM & SVP Systems at Graphcore.

“For INESC-ID, SparCity will leverage the efforts on the European low power processing technologies (in particular the European Processor Initiative) and contribute to the realisation of future exascale system architectures based on such technologies” says Prof. Leonel Sousa, Full Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, and Senior Researcher of the High-Performance Computer Architectures and Systems Research Group.