Austria, Finland and Sweden have signed the European Declaration on High Performance Computing (EuroHPC Declaration) announcing their intention to join the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.
This Undertaking aims to pool European and national resources totalling €1 billion to build a world-class HPC infrastructure. EuroHPC is currently supported by 18 countries and is envisaged to tun from 2019 until the end of 2026.
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.
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, Austria, Finland and Sweden (June 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.
As a result, the European Commission published in January a proposal for a Council Regulation establishing the HPC Joint Undertaking. The proposal recognises that HPC is an essential tool in addressing health challenges and in applying personalised and precision medicine. The Commission also emphasised in the accompanying Q&A document that “HPC is the cornerstone in developing new drugs”. It can accelerate the testing of drug candidate molecules and help repositioning existing drugs for new diseases.
More information on the EuroHPC Declaration and Joint Undertaking can be found here.
