High Performance Computing
01DESCRIPTION
On 11 January 2018, the European Commission unveiled its plans to invest jointly with the Member States in building a world-class European supercomputers infrastructure. Supercomputers are needed to process ever larger amounts of data and bring benefits tothe society in many areas from health care and renewable energy to car safety and cybersecurity. European scientists and industry increasingly process their data outside the EU because their needs are not matched by the computation time or computer performance available in the EU.
A new legal and funding structure – the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking – shall acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. It will also support a research and innovation programme to develop the technologies and machines (hardware) as well as the applications (software) that would run on these supercomputers.
The EU's contribution in EuroHPC will be around EUR 486 million under the current Multiannual Financial Framework, matched by a similar amount from Member States and associated countries. Overall, around EUR 1 billion of public funding would be invested by 2020, and private members of the initiative would also add in kind contributions. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will operate in 2019-2026.
The planned infrastructure will be jointly owned and operated by its members consisting at first of the countries that have signed the EuroHPC declaration and private members from academia and industry. Other members can join this cooperation at any moment, provided their financial contribution. The EuroHPC declaration, signed on 23 March 2017 at the Digital Day in Rome by seven Member States – France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain They were joined during 2017 by Belgium, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece and Croatia. These countries agreed to build a pan-European integrated exascale supercomputing infrastructure Other Member States and associated countries are encouraged to sign the EuroHPC declaration.