The Council of the EU has proposed to invest in establishing a joint infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC).
The Council of the EU – which gathers the Ministers of the 28 EU Member States – has proposed to establish a joint undertaking pooling Member State, EU and industry resources to invest in establishing an infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC). Member States will contribute €486 million to this initiative.
Of particular note, is that in the proposed regulation the Council specifically recognises the benefits of HPC for computer modelling and simulation and health, personalised and precision medicine, including for the development of new medicines.
The EU is aiming to cooperate and acquire state of the art supercomputers to allow access to industry, academia and public authorities to use them to encourage innovation and economic growth. The countries that have expressed their intent to join are: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland.
The timeframe for the Joint Undertaking is 2019-2022 and the proposal is scheduled to be adopted in the end of 2018. The European Parliament is currently working on its opinion on the Council’s proposal.
Background
In the past months, HPC has gained a lot of traction at EU level. 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. The fastest supercomputer in the EU ranks 14th on the global list. To tackle this, the EU has set the objective to have EU exascale computers in the global top 3 by 2022-2023.
For more information, please find the proposal for a Council Regulation on establishing the European HPC Joint Undertaking here.
