Minister visits SDU eScience Centre
Monday, minister for Digital Affairs Caroline Stage visited SDU eScience Centre and got to see our impressive HPC
Dear staff
On Monday morning, after lots of work and preparations, the SDU eScience Centre welcomed the Minister for Digital Affairs, Caroline Stage.
It has long been a wish of the centre to invite the Minister to come and learn more about UCloud and the supercomputer. The Minister has been visiting several of the country's universities, so it is also important that she comes to SDU to hear about our activities.
We were lucky to find a gap in her calendar where she was travelling from Copenhagen to Aarhus. So it was Monday morning at 9.00, where we had 1 hour and 15 minutes to present SDU eScience Centre, take photos for LinkedIn etc. and get down to the basement to see the supercomputer.
High performance computing (HPC) is not the easiest subject in the world to communicate, but it was clear that the Minister has her finger on the pulse with knowledge of both national and international activities.
I (and our Rector has admitted the same) had a hard time keeping up several times while the Minister and the head of centre Claudio Pica were throwing around technical terms. I felt that Claudio and his staff demonstrated very convincingly that our eScience Centre is unique.
The centre has a strong focus on the user and is agile when it comes to developing new solutions for researchers and students. Many benefits were highlighted in the new geopolitical agenda and AI era, which places great demands on computing power.
I think the Minister was impressed when Martin from the centre was able to pull a drawer out of the supercomputer and tell that this device was over a hundred times more efficient than a similar one at Gefion, which just celebrated its first birthday last week. This shows just how fast the development in HPC is going.
I would like to thank the SDU eScience Centre and the employees at IMADA for all the hard work they have put into organising this visit and making it run to perfection. I also hope that it can inspire more ministers to come by and see what NAT has to offer.
Marianne Holmer, dean