Estonia is the 21st European country to sign the European declaration on high-performance computing (HPC), which aims to pool European and national resources to build a world-class HPC infrastructure.
HPC has gained a lot of traction at EU level in the past months. This is mainly due to the fact that none of the EU supercomputers are currently in the global top 10 and the existing ones depend on non-European technology. Despite investments both at national and EU level, compared to its competitors from USA, China or Japan, Europe is clearly underinvesting in HPC with a funding gap of €500-750 million per year. At the moment, EU industry provides about 5% of HPC resources worldwide, but uses one third of them.
On 23 March 2017, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain signed the EuroHPC Declaration. Since then, they have been joined by Belgium (June 2017), Slovenia (July 2017), Bulgaria (October 2017), Switzerland (October 2017), Greece (November 2017), Croatia (November 2017), Czech Republic (January 2018), Cyprus (February 2018), Poland (May 2018), Lithuania (June 2018), Austria (June 2018), Finland (June 2018), Sweden (June 2018) to conclude with Estonia in Aug 2018. It can be assumed that more countries will join the EuroHPC Declaration in the coming months.
These countries agreed to build a world-class HPC infrastructure that would rank among the world’s top by 2022-2023. More specifically, by signing the declaration, the countries marked their intention to join the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking that will pool European resources to develop top-of-the-range exascale supercomputers for processing big data. To support this effort, €1 billion will be invested by the European Commission and Member States in building world-class supercomputers infrastructure by 2020. Private contributions will also add in to this public funding.
The Joint Undertaking is then expected to start operating in 2019 and to remain operational until the end of 2026.
Further details are available here.
