22 March 2021
News from Europe and its supercomputing strategy
On September 16, 2020 EC President von der Leyen, in her State of the Union address, set out the ambitious mission of ensuring the EU's leading role in supercomputing, funded by a substantially larger budget of €8 billion for the period 2021-2033. A key actor is the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private partners aiming at a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe. In an interesting interview to HPCwire journal, the new executive director of the EuroHPC JU, Anders Jensen, highlighted the assets of the unique EU approach: "Getting agreement among many countries rather than just one is a key thing that makes the European approach more challenging, but this is what the EU should be all about: making it a win-win for all the participating countries. [...] Europe is not only a driving force behind supercomputing applications development, for example for simulations and scientific research, but it has also a leading position in fundamental research on emerging technologies such as quantum computing”.
Meanwhile, the EuroHPC JU partnership signed a contract and started the operational phases to develop two pre-exascale supercomputers: Leonardo and LUMI. One more pre-exascale machine in Spain (at BSC) will complete the EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputer family.
The computing power of these pre-exascale supercomputers will be complemented by five additional EuroHPC petascale supercomputers to be built in Luxembourg (at LuxProvide), Slovenia (at IZUM), Czech Republic (at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center), Bulgaria (at Sofiatech) and Portugal (at MACC).
For more recent evolutions, follow the official pages of EuroHPC JU, Leonardo and LUMI.