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PDC Center for High Performance Computing

Introduction to PDC

PDC at a glance

  • The PDC Center for High Performance Computing (PDC) is hosted at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm as part of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

  • PDC is a key associate of the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden ( NAISS ), which is the leading provider of HPC services for academic research in Sweden.

  • PDC provides high-performance computing (HPC) services for academic research . PDC’s HPC services  are made available to Swedish and European academic researchers, respectively via NAISS and EuroHPC.

  • KTH and PDC also provide HPC services for industry/business research .

  • PDC’s HPC services include the provision of:

    • supercomputing  and data storage  resources,

    • software  for simulation and modelling, plus

    • assistance from a range of application and system experts. (Application experts are researchers with expertise both in HPC and in another research field, for example, molecular dynamics or computational fluid dynamics.)

  • The NAISS HPC system at PDC is Dardel, an HPE Cray EX with both CPU and GPU partitions. More information about the Dardel system can be found here .

Dardel
  • PDC also contributes to the development of widely-used software for research  (GROMACS, Neko, UppASD, VeloxChem and VIAMD).

  • PDC participates in various national and international projects and research centres that work to promote the use of HPC in research and to improve the existing HPC infrastructures for research in Sweden and in Europe, as well as paving the way to making exascale computing a reality. You can see the projects and centres that PDC is working with .

  • PDC’s HPC systems are run in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly manner - for more information about this, see Sustainable computation and data storage with PDC .

  • PDC receives most of its funding from KTH, NAISS, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and the European Union (EU).

 PDC background & overview

  • PDC was founded in 1990 and developed into a centre providing HPC computing and storage resources, together with advanced system and application support, to Swedish academic researchers, particularly in the Stockholm region. PDC has grown to be one of Sweden’s major national supercomputing centres and is involved with a range of national and international projects and research centres. For more information about how PDC evolved, see this material about the history of PDC .
  • As a centre serving the Stockholm region, PDC collaborates closely with the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm University and other schools and divisions at KTH, although about half of PDC’s usage is generated by researchers elsewhere in Sweden or Europe via NAISS.
  • PDC’s facilities are also used for commercial research (for example, by Scania). To support European industry and innovation through the use of HPC, PDC offers both commercial and open-source software suitable for use in many different industry segments.
  • PDC’s activities are funded primarily by the Swedish Research Council (VR) through NAISS, and by KTH, with additional support from various Scandinavian and European HPC research projects.