July 3, 2018 — Today in Strasbourg the European Parliament voted to approve the Commission’s proposal to establish a European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), a legal and funding entity that will pool EU and national resources to build world-class high performance computing (also known as supercomputing) and data infrastructures in Europe.
The goal of the JU is to:
- Acquire and provide across Europe by 2020 a world-class pre-exascale supercomputing infrastructure, that would match the demanding application requirements of European users from the public and private sectors;
- Support a European Research and Innovation programme to create an innovative HPC ecosystem in terms of technologies and systems (including the first generation of European low-power microprocessor technology and the co-design of European exascale machine capable of at least 1018 calculations per second), applications, and skills.
The integrated European HPC infrastructure the JU plans to create will bring benefits for Europe’s leadership in science, industrial competitiveness, engineering skills and know-how, and society as whole. It will be jointly owned and operated by the JU’s members: countries that have signed the European Declaration on High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) declaration, which has so far been signed by 20 European countries, and private members from academia and industry. Other members can join at any moment, provided that they pledge a financial contribution.
Next steps
The proposal to establish the EuroHPC JU will be formally adopted by the Council of the European Union in September.
The seat of the JU will be in Luxembourg.
Source: European Commission