Europe Aims to Become World Leader in Supercomputing

By Michael Feldman

February 16, 2012

In what is increasingly seen as a global competition for supercomputing capability, the European Commission (EC) this week put forth a plan to double its investment in high performance computing and deploy exascale machines before the end of the decade. The plan would increase Europe’s public HPC spend from €630 million to €1.2 billion and pump a greater share of the money into development, training, and creating “new centres of excellence.”

Some of the impetus to crank up supercomputing investment by the Europeans is being driven by the globalization of the technology. That world-wide competition they face is reflected by the build-out of supercomputing infrastructure across the world. For example, three years ago, the US owned 58 percent of the fastest supercomputers, according to the TOP500 list. Today, that figure is down to 53 percent. Most of the shrinking US share was the result of the rapid growth in top supercomputers in China, which grew from 3 percent of the total nearly 15 percent over the same period.

But competition in the upper echelons of HPC is fierce, and requires continued investment. Europe’s share of the top supers has decreased dramatically since 2008, from 30.6 percent to 20.6 percent, and has already been eclipsed by Asia, which has soared to a 23.6 percent share. In the fast-moving supercomputing biz, you can’t be complacent; there are actually four fewer countries in the TOP500 club in 2011 than there were in 2008.

As it stands now, both the US and Japan each have more supercomputing capacity than all of Europe combined, and the continent’s lone top 10 system is the Bull-built supercomputer for the French Atomic Energy Authority. It certainly doesn’t have to be that way though. According to an IDC study, even though European GDP is roughly equal to that of the United States, the European Union (EU) only spends about half as much on big iron.

Those kinds of data points have compelled the European Commission to rethink its HPC spending habits, and for Neelie Kroes, the EC Vice President responsible for Europe’s Digital Agenda, to issue statements like this: “High Performance Computing is a crucial enabler for European industry and for more jobs in Europe. It’s investments like HPC that deliver innovations improving daily life. We’ve got to invest smartly in this field because we cannot afford to leave it to our competitors.”

As in the US and elsewhere, HPC is seen as a strategic technology to help solve societal issues like climate change and health care and advancing basic science in areas like particle physics and genomics. It is also seen as a means to spur businesses come up with new products and services, as well as increase productivity. As was noted by the EC report that describes its new HPC investment strategy: “At a macroeconomic level, it has been shown that returns on investment in HPC are extremely high and that the companies and countries that invest the most in HPC lead in science and economic success.”

The EC has attributed fully half of European productivity growth over the past 15 years to innovation in information and communications technologies. Not all of that is attributed to HPC, but as is noted by the same EC report, these cutting-edge technologies often make their way into the broader IT foodchain, and vice versa:

Advances in the area of HPC such as new computing technologies, software, energy efficiency, storage applications, etc. feed into the broader ICT industry and the consumer mass market, becoming available in households within five years of their introduction in high-end HPC. Conversely, advanced computing technologies developed for the consumer domain (e.g. energy efficient chips, graphic cards) are increasingly used in HPC.

The EC sees an opening here in the race to the exascale computing. Given that many of the technologies needed to support these exa-machines have yet to be developed, the playing field has been somewhat leveled, at least temporarily. In particular, these future systems will require components that are 100 times as energy efficient as those used in the current crop of supercomputers, and will need new programming models that can deal with millions of processing elements. To that end, the Europeans believe they can leverage their expertise in low-power computing, systems design, and integration.

The new EC plan is to devote about a quarter of the €1.2 billion to this type of R&D and in scaling up HPC software. An additional quarter of the funds is earmarked for training, especially in the area of parallel programming. The remaining half of the funds will be used to procure the HPC systems themselves.

That means about €600 million ($788 million) will be available to buy the machines, an amount roughly equal to the entire European HPC spend in 2009. That probably won’t bring it up to the level of the US, which spent an average of $979 million annually on supercomputers over last five years of the previous decade, but will put it in a much stronger number two position.

This is all certainly good news for PRACE, the Partnership of Advanced Computing in Europe, which is tasked to develop and manage a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, as well as deliver HPC education and training. Its 24 member countries and the supercomputer centers they host are beholden to funding from the EU, and if the doubling of the money holds up, PRACE’s footprint should expand considerably.

The challenge for Europe is to bring the money to the table. It’s not exactly the most settled of fiscal times for the continent right now. Certainly the realization is there that HPC is an investment with a proven ROI. And since no single country in Europe is capable of keeping pace with the US (and possibly China) in this race to exascale, it makes sense for the member countries to band together. Europe may never be at the top of the heap in supercomputing, but it should certainly be among the world leaders.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

2024 Winter Classic: Meet Team Morehouse

April 17, 2024

Morehouse College? The university is well-known for their long list of illustrious graduates, the rigor of their academics, and the quality of the instruction. They were one of the first schools to sign up for the Winter Read more…

MLCommons Launches New AI Safety Benchmark Initiative

April 16, 2024

MLCommons, organizer of the popular MLPerf benchmarking exercises (training and inference), is starting a new effort to benchmark AI Safety, one of the most pressing needs and hurdles to widespread AI adoption. The sudde Read more…

Quantinuum Reports 99.9% 2-Qubit Gate Fidelity, Caps Eventful 2 Months

April 16, 2024

March and April have been good months for Quantinuum, which today released a blog announcing the ion trap quantum computer specialist has achieved a 99.9% (three nines) two-qubit gate fidelity on its H1 system. The lates Read more…

Mystery Solved: Intel’s Former HPC Chief Now Running Software Engineering Group 

April 15, 2024

Last year, Jeff McVeigh, Intel's readily available leader of the high-performance computing group, suddenly went silent, with no interviews granted or appearances at press conferences.  It led to questions -- what's Read more…

Exciting Updates From Stanford HAI’s Seventh Annual AI Index Report

April 15, 2024

As the AI revolution marches on, it is vital to continually reassess how this technology is reshaping our world. To that end, researchers at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) put out a yearly report to t Read more…

Crossing the Quantum Threshold: The Path to 10,000 Qubits

April 15, 2024

Editor’s Note: Why do qubit count and quality matter? What’s the difference between physical qubits and logical qubits? Quantum computer vendors toss these terms and numbers around as indicators of the strengths of t Read more…

MLCommons Launches New AI Safety Benchmark Initiative

April 16, 2024

MLCommons, organizer of the popular MLPerf benchmarking exercises (training and inference), is starting a new effort to benchmark AI Safety, one of the most pre Read more…

Exciting Updates From Stanford HAI’s Seventh Annual AI Index Report

April 15, 2024

As the AI revolution marches on, it is vital to continually reassess how this technology is reshaping our world. To that end, researchers at Stanford’s Instit Read more…

Intel’s Vision Advantage: Chips Are Available Off-the-Shelf

April 11, 2024

The chip market is facing a crisis: chip development is now concentrated in the hands of the few. A confluence of events this week reminded us how few chips Read more…

The VC View: Quantonation’s Deep Dive into Funding Quantum Start-ups

April 11, 2024

Yesterday Quantonation — which promotes itself as a one-of-a-kind venture capital (VC) company specializing in quantum science and deep physics  — announce Read more…

Nvidia’s GTC Is the New Intel IDF

April 9, 2024

After many years, Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) was back in person and has become the conference for those who care about semiconductors and AI. I Read more…

Google Announces Homegrown ARM-based CPUs 

April 9, 2024

Google sprang a surprise at the ongoing Google Next Cloud conference by introducing its own ARM-based CPU called Axion, which will be offered to customers in it Read more…

Computational Chemistry Needs To Be Sustainable, Too

April 8, 2024

A diverse group of computational chemists is encouraging the research community to embrace a sustainable software ecosystem. That's the message behind a recent Read more…

Hyperion Research: Eleven HPC Predictions for 2024

April 4, 2024

HPCwire is happy to announce a new series with Hyperion Research  - a fact-based market research firm focusing on the HPC market. In addition to providing mark Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Eyes on the Quantum Prize – D-Wave Says its Time is Now

January 30, 2024

Early quantum computing pioneer D-Wave again asserted – that at least for D-Wave – the commercial quantum era has begun. Speaking at its first in-person Ana Read more…

GenAI Having Major Impact on Data Culture, Survey Says

February 21, 2024

While 2023 was the year of GenAI, the adoption rates for GenAI did not match expectations. Most organizations are continuing to invest in GenAI but are yet to Read more…

Intel’s Xeon General Manager Talks about Server Chips 

January 2, 2024

Intel is talking data-center growth and is done digging graves for its dead enterprise products, including GPUs, storage, and networking products, which fell to Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire