Thomas Lippert Elected Chair of PRACE Council

Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, head of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, member of the board of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), and director of JARA-HPC, was elected Chair of the PRACE Council during the 30th Council meeting in Amsterdam on 18 June 2018. He will serve a two-year term in this position. The PRACE Council is the highest decision-making body in PRACE, overseeing the research infrastructure and users’ access to resources across the PRACE member organizations. Lippert became the German delegate in January 2018, but has long been involved in the creation and guidance of PRACE even before it was officially founded. He served as an advisor to Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem, former Director of Forschungszentrum Jülich and the founding Council Chair of PRACE.

According to Lippert, the challenge ahead for PRACE is to provide true exascale computing capability for science and industry in Europe. As PRACE Council Chair – and together with his colleagues and the scientific and industrial advisors – he is keen to bring the top-level HPC provision and support of PRACE together with the exascale systems of the coming EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.