The European supercomputing arena is picking up steam. According to EuroHPC.eu (a website that tracks public information on ongoing EU-funded supercomputing projects) there are currently at least 107 projects funded under the Horizon 2020 program with a total budget of more than 570 million euro. And European HPC investment is set to soar even higher under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU), Europe’s exascale-focused funding mechanism.
The Horizon 2020-funded projects are led by 42 organizations, with a number of those organizations responsible for more than 10 projects each. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) received funding for an impressive 43 projects, and Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Edinburgh each had 19 projects funded.
Projects can be viewed at eurohpc.eu/projects. Note that several projects are not listed yet due to a lack of publicly available data. These include the EPI (European Processor Initiative) with about 40 million euro funding and PRACE-IP6 with about 25 million euro.
Horizon 2020 accepted its final calls last year, and the EuroHPC JU is now in the process of fully supplanting the Horizon 2020 funding program for HPC projects. The JU, which boasts nearly 1.5 billion euro in funding, held its first meeting just six months ago. Since then, EuroHPC has already issued–and closed, as of last month–two calls for proposals: the first for hosting pre-exascale supercomputers and a second for hosting petascale supercomputers.
The pre-exascale call garnered proposals from three consortia, one led by BSC, one led by the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC), and the CINECA-led consortium. Proposals totaled 650 million euro compared to the 500 million euro of available funding (250 million euro from direct EuroHPC funding and a matched amount from consortium countries). At least two consortia will be funded.
With just one call for proposals–albeit a major call–budgeted for nearly the same amount as all current Horizon 2020 projects, the pre-exascale call highlights the commitment that the EU is making to the exascale era.