EuroHPC Research and Innovation Call Announced

Aug. 25, 2020 — The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is publishing a new call for proposals to support the development of European low-power HPC processors and accelerators. This action will complete the European HPC supply value chain and develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe.

This call (H2020-JTI-EuroHPC-2020-02) was announced in the annual Work Plan of the EuroHPC JU for the year 2020 and is a follow-up of the Specific Grant Agreement (EPI-SGA1: 826647), which established the European Processor Initiative (EPI) in 2018.

The EPI is facilitating the development of exascale supercomputers, computing systems able to perform more than one trillion (10¹⁸) operations per second. The EPI aims at providing industry in Europe with a competitive edge in processor technology to be further exploited across a wide range of applications from engineering, science and bio-medical to automotive, manufacturing, finance and emerging big-data and smart objects fields.

With a total budget of EUR 35 million, expected to be matched by an equal amount by the EuroHPC Participating States and the beneficiaries in the project, the call is addressing the Phase 2 of the design and development of European low-power processors and related technologies for extreme-scale computing, high-performance data-analytics, Artificial Intelligence and emerging applications.

The selected proposal will have to build on the results of the Phase 1 of the EPI project and is expected to cover the following topics:

Development of the second generation of low-power general purpose processing system units,
Development of the second generation of low-power processing system units to accelerate specific HPC and big data applications;
Validation of the first generation of low-power processing system units developed in Phase 1 (and Phase 2).
Support for a hardware and software development platform common to different processor and accelerator types.

The developed technologies will have to demonstrate the synergies between HPC at the exascale level and emerging computing applications, in the automotive sector for example. Sustainability, notably energy-efficiency and economic viability of the developed solutions will be key aspects during the evaluation of proposals.

More details on the call are available in the Funding & tender opportunities portal of the European Commission.

Next steps

Another call related to the R&I programme is expected to be published in September 2020:

H2020-JTI-EuroHPC-2020-03: Training and Education on High Performance Computing. A Coordination and Support Action (CSA) aiming at developing a quality-controlled educational master programme for HPC of pan-European reach. The programme will be developed and launched in close cooperation with major stakeholders, including the relevant European industry players, HPC Competence Centres, HPC Centres of Excellence and PRACE ( Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), in order to address concrete needs of industry in HPC.

About EuroHPC JU

The EuroHPC JU was established by Council Regulation (EU) 2018/1488 in 2018. 32 European countries are currently taking part in the initiative.

The mission of the EuroHPC JU is to develop, deploy, extend and maintain an integrated world-class supercomputing and data infrastructure in the European Union (EU) and to develop and support a highly competitive and innovative HPC ecosystem.

The EuroHPC JU aims at equipping the EU by early 2021 with an infrastructure of petascale and precursor to exascale supercomputers, and developing the necessary technologies and applications for reaching full exascale capabilities around 2022 / 2023.

Source: European Commission