May 30, 2018 — Poland has signed the EuroHPC declaration, becoming the sixteenth country to participate in this joint national and European effort to build the next generation of computing and data infrastructures in Europe. On signing the declaration, Jarosław Gowin, Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and Higher Education, commented:

By signing the HPC declaration we declare our commitment to become a Member State of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking once it is established. We are prepared to provide the Polish national HPC capacities and capabilities for this joint mission. HPC is a very dynamic R&D domain, which becomes crucial for development of European science and business communities. Supercomputing makes it possible to reduce the costs of doing research and technology deployment, providing for quicker response to global challenges.

Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, and Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, welcomed this important step for EuroHPC:

We are very happy to welcome Poland into this bold European initiative. Only by aligning our efforts and pooling resources will we be able to acquire and deploy an integrated world-class supercomputing infrastructure at European level. This infrastructure will provide a large set of advanced computing, data and networking resources and services. They will support many key HPC scientific, industrial and public sector applications such as solid state physics and fluid dynamics, epidemiology, biomolecular modelling, and neuroscience for a wide variety of users from Poland and from all over Europe.

By signing the EuroHPC declaration, Poland has announced its intention of joining the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) once it is formally adopted by the Council of the European Union.

The EuroHPC JU, proposed by the European Commission on 11 January 2018, is a legal and funding entity that aims to pool EU and national resources with the goal of:

• acquiring and providing across Europe by 2020 a world-class pre-exascale supercomputing infrastructure, capable of a hundred million billion or 10¹⁷ calculations per second, in order to match the demanding application requirements of Europe’s scientific and industrial users;
• supporting the development of European supercomputing technology, including the first generation of European low-power microprocessor technology and the co-design of European exascale machines (capable of at least a billion billion or 10¹⁸ calculations per second);
• fostering applications and skills development and the wider use of high-performance computing.

The EuroHPC infrastructure will boost Europe’s scientific capabilities and industrial competitiveness by supporting a wide range of users, including scientific communities, large-scale industry and SMEs, as well as the public sector, across Europe.

Through its research and innovation programme on European technology development, the JU intends to create a leading European HPC ecosystem that will put Europe in the HPC global top 3 by 2022/23

With a total budget of approximately EUR 1 billion, the JU is expected to start operating in 2019 and remain operational until the end of 2026. It will provide financial support, in the form of procurement and R&I grants, to participants following open and competitive calls. The new infrastructure will be jointly owned and operated by the JU’s members: countries that have signed the EuroHPC declaration, and private members from academia and industry. Other members can join at any moment, provided that they pledge a financial contribution.

Background

The EuroHPC declaration was originally launched in March 2017 at the Digital Day and signed by France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Since then, Belgium, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Cyprus have joined them.

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Source: European Commission