Road opens to building world-class supercomputers in Europe

Representatives of supercomputing centres in eight EU countries marked the signature Tuesday of hosting agreements launching the procurement process for the acquisition and installation of the new supercomputers.

The supercomputing centres have been selected to host the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking's first supercomputers.

Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, said: "These signatures mark a milestone in the Joint Undertaking's activities, bringing us a step closer to our ambition of making Europe a global leader in high performance computing. By the end of next year, eight world-class supercomputers will help European researchers and industry, wherever they are in the EU, run applications that require large amounts of computing power to make significant advances in fighting climate change, designing new medicine, developing new materials, and many other areas."

The agreements are contractual documents that define the roles, rights and obligations of each hosting entity. The procurement process for the eight new supercomputers can now begin.

Three of the new machines will be pre-exascale supercomputers (capable of executing more than 150 Petaflops, or 150 million billion calculations per second). They will be located at the following supercomputing centres:

• Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Spain

• CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland

• CINECA, Italy.

The other five machines will be petascale supercomputers (capable of executing more than one Petaflop, or 1 million billion calculations per second). These five petascale supercomputers will be co-owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and will be located in the following supercomputing centres:

• Sofiatech, Bulgaria

• IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center,

Czech Republic

• Luxprovide, Luxembourg

• Minho Advanced Computing Centre, Portugal • IZUM, Slovenia.

The new supercomputers will be made accessible to European researchers, industry and businesses, to develop new applications in areas such as artificial intelligence and personalised medicine, drug and material design, bio-engineering, weather forecasting, and combatting climate change.

The petascale supercomputers are expected to start operating in mid-2020, and the pre-exascale supercomputers to be accessible by the end of 2020, for use by European users from academia, industry and the public sector.

The Commission has also announced that North Macedonia is joining the initiative as its 30th participating country.

Now that the hosting agreements have been signed, calls for tender for the procurement (acquisition, installation and maintenance) of these eight supercomputers are being published. The call for tender for the procurement of the three pre-exascale supercomputers will be online in the next few days, while the call for tender for the procurement of the five petascale supercomputers will follow before the end of 2019.