Science at the Cervantes Institute in Berlin
CERFA collaborates closely with the Instituto Cervantes Berlin in its Science Program, and I was invited to moderate a conversation between
- Prof. Christof Schütte, President of the Zuse Institute Berlin & Chair of the National Alliance for High-Performance Computing and
- Prof. Mateo Valero, Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center
The event, titled Supercomputing in Europe, was part of the 2025 Berlin Science Week (my second participation!) and focused on the present and future of Supercomputing in Europe, offering complementary scientific and technological perspectives on the challenges of high-performance-computing.
As you’ll see from the discussion below, the geopolitically savvy panelists immediately brought up the important questions of our time: national interests, European sovereignty in data and technology, and supply-chain independence, among others. This blew (luckily) past my original sketch for moderating the discussion, that was admittedly optimistic in scope:
- engineering: technological advances & challenges, shifting paradigms in HPC-architectures from classic CPU vs GPU for AI/inference vs emergence of quantum computing
- science: the type of problems tackled by supercomputing, from health modelling to drug-discovery to climate to aeronautical to disease modelling…
- policy: nationally funded large infrastructures, interactions with the state & EU, global standing wrt China and EU management: the figure of the scientist-manager at the head of large scientific organizations
As a scientist and HPC-user myself, I enjoyed moderating a discussion that made clear how HPC operations extend well beyond science and technology into governance, strategy, and society.
See for yourself!
