Ángel Rubio Appointed External Director of Max Planck Society's Fritz Haber Institute

As indicated and covered by numerous media, Angel Rubio a top researcher based at the University of the Basque Country has been appointed external director of Max Planck.

Professor Rubio is one of Europe's biggest HPC users accessing Petaflop resources across numerous world leading research institutions. His team is based in young and attractive city of San Sebastian where the team hosts numerous computing platforms and actively develop world class scientific code. And they are hiring!

Once again, congratulations Prof Rubio!

Nanoscience & Nanotechnology and High Performance Computing

The conference IMAGINENANO 2011 to be held in Bilbao on Aprill 11-14, 2011 at the Bilbao Exhibition Center will held a symposium on High Performance Computing and nanotechnology. Bilbao will become the capital of the strong Basque HPC ecosystem. The symposium is organized in conjunction with Sandia Labs, and includes speakers from CEA, Tyndall, AIST, CIN2, EHU, RIST, QuantumWise, CNR-ITSM and many others.

Registrations and further information here.

HPC-NN2011 (1-Day symposium) will be held on the 14th of April (Thursday). The aim of this symposium is to assemble an international panel of key individuals involved in High-Performance-Computing (HPC) developments focused on Nanoscience & Nanotechnology (N&N) applications. HPC became a strategical tool to explore complex physical and chemical properties of matter at the nanoscale.

Micro-Nano-Bio Convergence Systems Conference 2011

Conference to be held in Mondragon, Basque Country next April 5-6 2011.

Organized by Ikerlan:

Micro-Nano-Bio Convergence Systems is a major domain within the field of Microsystems & Smart Systems Integration, which is being supported by the European Commission under the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) priority.

We already talked about ikerlan's work. The group announced today with another company the expansion of infrastructure with an investment of 160m€.

Nanogune Cleanroom

A video of the nanogune installations in San Sebastian Donostia;

Nanoptics, Nanomagnetism, and Nanodevices opportunities

CIC nanoGUNE is seeking to recruit talented, enthusiastic people who will participate in its growing scientific program and serve its collaborative, technology transfer and outreach engaging mission. This includes both senior and junior researchers, post-docs, graduate students, highly qualified technicians, and administrative and other supporting staff.

Why should your HPC project be in the Basque Country ?

The Following document will provide some insights for those willing to relocate their High Performance Computing activities to the Basque Country. As you will find on the gubernamental web page, your project can benefit from key strategic areas: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Electronics, and Alternative Energies expert know-how.

Investing in the Basque Country

Labein-Tecnalia goes away to compute

Labein Tecnalia, very soon Tecnalia, created not long ago NANOC the centre for Nanomaterials Applications in construction. Here they work with CSIC the Spanish National Research Council.

It is very interesting that these guys are working on high performance materials for construction. However they need to use other people's high performance computing resources to do so.

Having a look at CESGA's annual report, these partners have been calculating on the Galician centre's resources for the 2007-2009 period and I believe that possible during 2010 as well.

Some quick numbers:

-They used 673,861 cpu hours (2007-2009 period)
-Assuming their codes used around 128 cpus (lets say SIESTA code, but I do not know them so I have to pick one :) )
-This means 219 days in 3 years or 73 days per year.

Now, my opinion: I do not know these guys, but I wonder, having as we have resources here and probably sometimes misused, and assuming the Tecnalia and the local universities work together in certain projects: why dont they finally team up to excel in the hardware/software management (at least) ?