On the agenda was the use by industry and commercial enterprises of European high performance services. Some hundred exclusively-invited representatives of leading companies attended the presentations and were offered the opportunity to express their HPC needs during the discussions with the keynote speakers which were moderated by Mark Parsons from EPCC, Edinburgh.

PRACE co-ordinator Achim Bachem stressed the importance for industry to have this key technology, which HPC represents, ready 6 years in advance in order to timely and adequately meet future challenges. The European member states cannot cope with this task separately. Therefore PRACE has taken the HPC infrastructure initiative at a European scale. Achim Bachem herewith referred to the INCITE-programme, the American counterpart of PRACE.

Mister Hamelin from the French energy company EDF and Mister San Luis from the Spanish petroleum company Repsol shared their success stories on the use of HPC in the nuclear industry and in the oil drilling business in the Gulf of Mexico with the audience.

Dr. Kalwani from General Motors in the United States told about his experiences with the American INCITE-programme. He had one important lesson in store for the PRACE partners and end users: the biggest challenge is not the adoption of HPC technology and its correspondence with the industrial needs but the solving of legal issues. In the United States this took no less than six months. Talking about the importance of being 'mercator sapiens' indeed.

Dr. Robin from PRACE partner CEA-GENCI shed light on the future HPC trends with regards to processors and accelerators, and the evolution of the current Petaflop systems. Jabob de Vlieg talked about the role of HPC in the design and development of new drugs.

The PRACE seminar ended in style including an interview with Peter Grünberg, winner of the 2007 Physics Nobel Prize; an overview of the PRACE results and useful experiences up till now by Dr. Lippert from the Jülich Research Center; and a working dinner where guest speaker Dr. van den Herik from Tilburg University enthusiastically stimulated the participants to go for IT.