SCL's Vladimir Slavnic attended HPC workshop organized by the PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) project at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) from 21 to 23 October 2009. The workshop was focused on porting of codes and optimization of high performance numerical simulations. Researchers and students from all over the Europe were introduced to advanced programming models and optimization techniques. Main topics were code porting to OpenMP 3.0, Cell Superscalar (CellSs), UPC (Unified Parallel C) and CUDA frameworks.

During the PRACE workshop Slavnic had the opportunity to meet with a group of Serbian researches working at the BSC. Slavnic gave a brief presentation of the research done at Institute of Physics Belgrade (IPB), focusing particularly on Serbia's newly launched National Supercomputing Initiative and the plans to set up the Blue Danube supercomputing facility at the IPB.

Informal meetings such as this one represent key first steps in the setting up of a two-way process of exchange of expertise and information between BSC and IPB. Initiation of robust partnerships with BSC and other key PRACE partners is a prerequisite for Serbia's active participation in the project.