Academic and Research HPC environments in Asia and Europe underwent significant changes in the past years. Widely established standards at processors, node, interconnect and software level helped significantly to ease cross-site and cross-country collaboration and load-balancing. Examples of typical environments will be shown and future trends and new challenges including the potential use of HPC Clouds will be discussed.

Dr. Baetke manages HP's Global HPC-Technology Program for academic and research institutions. Dr. Baetke is the director & Board member of HP-CAST, the world-wide user group of HP-HPC; he is a board member of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC); a member of the Indian Supercomputing Conference (HiPC) steering committee; and is on the committees of several international High Performance Computing conferences. Dr. Baetke was Professor of Technology at the University of Munich and joined Convex Computer Corporation, and thence HP via merger, as the Global Director, High Performance Computing in 1986. Frank Baetke holds a master's degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in engineering and a Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in applied physics from the University of Munich. He has published numerous articles in the field of high-performance computing as well as contributions in related areas. He is a member of German Society of Informatics, the Society of Astronomy, ACM, IEEE and the Max Planck Society. He is based with Hewlett Packard in Munich, Germany.