Switzerland is well positioned to make a significant contribution to the future development of supercomputing based simulations. It does have a very high density of computational scientists with established track record in simulation-based science and engineering. Moreover, these research groups have stable base funding and are thus capable of taking a long-term view in method, algorithm, and software development projects.

In order to optimally prepare this community for disruptive and potentially even revolutionary developments in computer architectures during the coming decade, the Swiss University Conference (SUC) and the ETH Domain are jointly funding the Swiss Platform for High-Performance and High-Productivity (HP2C) in the context of the National Initiative for High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN).

The overarching goal of this initiative is to build a research program and a user-network of HP2C for simulation based science and engineering. The primary emphasis of the research effort will be on application scaling, performance and efficiency for future leadership computing architectures. The role of the user network will be to disseminate high-performance computing (HPC) related information technologies amongst domain scientists and to initiate a sustained and productive effort of application development for HPC platforms. The specific goal for the three-year duration of the project will be to:

1. Emerge with several high-impact scientific applications that scale and run efficiently on leadership computing platforms in the 2013 timeframe, and
2. Establish nodes of a network of domain sciences that are most likely to experience major scientific advances through HP2C.

The organizational approach of the HP2C project is as follows:

• A scientific computing core group, consisting mainly of computational mathematicians and computer scientists, will be established and maintained jointly between the Swiss National Supercomputer Center (CSCS) and the University of Lugano (USI), and will be partially funded by the HP2C project. Researchers of this core group will work closely with application developers and domain scientists at Swiss universities as well as the two federal institutes of technology, ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne.
• In order to initiate these interactions, the HP2C project will create a network of domain science projects that will engage in high-risk / high-payoff application development for the next generation supercomputers. Specifically, the HP2C project will fund in the period 2010-12, several application developers per project at Swiss Universities and EPF Lausanne that are embedded in domain science research groups and interact closely with the core group at CSCS and USI. Computational science and engineering groups at ETH Zurich and other institutions of the ETH Domain, as well as industry, will be able to participate in the network as well with their own funding resources. Furthermore, it is expected that projects and research groups with common algorithmic and software requirements will benefit from interaction in the network, and over the course of HP2C project will create nodes that will extend the network to new users in Switzerland and throughout Europe.
• The core group will operate and support prototype hardware, development environments and tools that will be available to the application developers that are embedded in the domain science projects.