The European Commission says the size of this plan is comparable to the size of Airbus or the Galileo satellite navigation project.
Seven European countries announced a joint initiative to acquire and deploy world-class high-performance computers, a project the European Commission says is comparable to the size of Airbus or the Galileo satellite navigation project.
The announce was part of the official celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, which took place in Rome on 23 March 2017. The plan to establish an integrated world-class high-performance computing infrastructure was launched by ministers from France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain who signed the EuroHPC declaration agree to work towards the establishment of a multi-government cooperation framework for acquiring and deploying an integrated supercomputing infrastructure of the next generation. Other Member States are encouraged to join in the future to work together and with the European Commission in this initiative.
They plan includes acquiring and deploying an integrated world-class high-performance computing infrastructure capable of at least 1018 calculations per second (so-called exascale computers). This will be available across the EU for scientific communities, industry and the public sector, no matter where the users are located.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Spanish National Supercomputing Network will have a key role in this agreement.
Next steps
The challenge ahead is for Member States in coordination with the European Commission to prepare an implementation roadmap to deploy the European exascale supercomputing infrastructure. This roadmap should address aspects involved in the HPC supply chain from operational requirements to the development of high-quality competitive European technology. It will also tackle the pooling of public and private resources for acquiring and operating the infrastructure. The target is to have by 2020 at least two pre-exascale computers and reach full exascale performance by 2023. The objective is also to define test-beds for HPC and big data applications that make use of these supercomputers for scientific, public administration and industrial purposes.
Further information about BSC at Digital Day 2017 here.