EU issues first call for supercomputers sites
Supercomputers - Image Blue Gene - PFrom Argonne National Laboratory
(BRUSSELS) - The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking launched its first calls for expressions of interest Monday to select the sites that will host its first supercomputers by the end of 2020.
Two calls form the joint undertaking (EuroHPC JU) are now open: one for hosting entities for petascale supercomputers (with a performance level capable of executing at least 1015 operations per second, or 1 Petaflop), and one for hosting entities for precursor to exascale supercomputers (with a performance level capable of executing more than 150 Petaflops).
The Joint Undertaking plans to acquire at least two of each kind of machine.
A hosting entity is an existing national supercomputing centre located in a Member State that is participating in the Joint Undertaking.
Deciding where Europe will host its most powerful petascale and precursor to exascale machines is only the first step, said Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, in what she called "this great European initiative on high performance computing."
"Regardless of where users are located in Europe, these supercomputers will be used in more than 800 scientific and industrial application fields for the benefit of European citizens," she said.
Supercomputing, also known as high performance computing (HPC), involves thousands of processors working in parallel to analyse billions of pieces of data in real time, performing calculations much faster than a normal computer, and enabling scientific and industrial challenges of great scale and complexity to be met.
The EuroHPC JU has the target of equipping the EU by the end of 2020 with a world-class supercomputing infrastructure that will be available to users from academia, industry and small and medium-sized enterprises, and the public sector. These new European supercomputers will also support the development of leading scientific, public sector and industrial applications in many domains, including personalised medicine, bio-engineering, weather forecasting and tackling climate change, discovering new materials and medicines, oil and gas exploration, designing new planes and cars, and smart cities.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking was established last year with the aim of equipping the EU by the end of 2020 with a world-class supercomputing infrastructure, which will support the development of leading scientific, public sector and industrial applications in many domains, including personalised medicine, bio-engineering, weather forecasting and tackling climate change, discovering new materials and medicines, oil and gas exploration, designing new planes and cars, and smart cities.
In addition to the above plans, the Joint Undertaking aims to acquire by 2022/23 exascale supercomputers, capable of 1018 operations per second, with at least one based on European HPC technology.