EU proposes 1 billion euro investment in world class supercomputers over the next 3-5 years

The European Commission contribution in EuroHPC will be around EUR 486 million under the current Multiannual Financial Framework, matched by a similar amount from Member States and associated countries. Overall, around EUR 1 billion of public funding would be invested by 2020, and private members of the initiative would also add in-kind contributions. The 1 billion Euros will build a world-class supercomputer infrastructure.

Supercomputers are needed to process ever larger amounts of data and bring benefits to the society in many areas from health care and renewable energy to car safety and cybersecurity.

Today’s step is crucial for the EU’s competitiveness and independence in the data economy. Today, European scientists and industry increasingly process their data outside the EU because their needs are not matched by the computation time or computer performance available in the EU. This lack of independence threatens privacy, data protection, commercial trade secrets, and ownership of data in particular for sensitive applications.

A new legal and funding structure – the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking – shall acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. It will also support a research and innovation programme to develop the technologies and machines (hardware) as well as the applications (software) that would run on these supercomputers.

Supercomputers are the engine to power the digital economy. It is a tough race and today the EU is lagging behind: we do not have any supercomputers in the world’s top-ten. With the EuroHPC initiative we want to give European researchers and companies world-leading supercomputer capacity by 2020 – to develop technologies such as artificial intelligence and build the future’s everyday applications in areas like health, security or engineering.

Supercomputers can reduce car production cycles from 60 months to 24 months.

Research and innovation matched with infrastructure

Today’s initiative will pool investments to establish leading European supercomputers and big data infrastructure. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking aims to acquire systems with pre-exascale performance (100 PetaFLOPS), and support the development of exascale (an ExaFlop), performance systems based on EU technology, by 2022-2023.

The activities of the Joint Undertaking will consist of:

Acquisition and operation of two world-class pre-exascale supercomputing machines and at least two mid-range supercomputing machines (capable of around 10 Petaflops), and providing and managing access to these supercomputers to a wide range of public and private users starting from 2020.

Research and innovation programme on HPC: to support the development of European supercomputing technology including the first generation of European low-power microprocessor technology, and the co-design of European exascale machines, and to foster applications, skills development and a wider use of High-Performance Computing.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will operate in 2019-2026. The planned infrastructure will be jointly owned and operated by its members consisting at first of the countries that have signed the EuroHPC declaration (list below) and private members from academia and industry. Other members can join this cooperation at any moment, provided their financial contribution.