July 29, 2019 — The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) has launched calls for proposals to fund research and innovation activities that will help Europe to remain globally competitive in the field of supercomputing.

EuroHPC began its operations in November 2018, with 29 European countries currently taking part. Its goal is to pool EU and national resources in order to develop an integrated world-class supercomputing and data infrastructure in Europe, and to create a highly competitive and innovative European HPC ecosystem. In June this year, it announced a joint investment, with the participating countries, of around €840 million to acquire and deploy eight world-class supercomputers in the EU before the end of 2020. These machines will multiply Europe’s current supercomputing capabilities by a factor of 5-10.

Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, said “These calls complement the substantial investment that is being made by the Joint Undertaking in Europe’s supercomputing infrastructure. They will help the Joint Undertaking draw on the skills and knowledge of European SMEs and industry to put its ambitious work plan into action and develop applications and services using this infrastructure. I am looking forward to seeing EU support for supercomputing continuing under the next Multiannual Financial Framework, for 2021-2027.”

On 12 July, EuroHPC’s Governing Board approved its work plan for 2019, with a focus on:

• supporting the development of essential technologies for exascale systems, industry-oriented HPC application platforms, and industrial software codes
• financing innovation activities for manufacturing and engineering SMEs
• establishing HPC competence centres in every EuroHPC participating country and coordinating their activities at European level.

The total budget of the work plan for 2019 will be €190 million (50% provided by the EU, and 50% by the participating countries). This sum will fund the calls now launched by EuroHPC, which will support research and innovation activities by European research stakeholders in the following areas:

1. Extreme scale computing and data driven technologies: supporting the European technology supply industry in developing next generation power-efficient and highly resilient HPC and data technologies
2. HPC and data-centric environments and application platforms: maintaining Europe’s world leadership in HPC applications by stimulating the innovation potential of businesses and industry users to develop applications in different industry sectors (such as manufacturing, farming, health, mobility, natural hazards, energy, climate, space, finance and cybersecurity) that will best use the available computational power of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking
3. Industrial software codes for extreme scale computing environments and applications: helping European software vendors to improve their offer of industrial software and codes for industrial users to make full use of new, very high-performing supercomputers
4. HPC Competence Centres: working with participating countries to develop national supercomputing competence centres in all EuroHPC participating countries, which will serve many users, provide knowledge and new digital skills training, and promote targeted actions for SMEs, networking their activities at European level.
5. Stimulating the innovation potential of SMEs: supporting European manufacturing and engineering SMEs to improve their innovation potential and competitiveness by using advanced HPC services.

The full text of the calls can be viewed here. The first three calls listed above will close on 14 January 2020, while the last two will close on 14 November 2019.

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Source: European Commission