On 27 February, Andrus Ansip, European Commission (EC) Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, visited Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and highlighted the importance that European Union (EU) to build its own supercomputers. “EU member states aren’t big enough to build next-generation supercomputers individually. We have to join forces, which is why we have launched the European High Performance Computing project (EuroHPC). In the EU we have to build our own exascale supercomputers,” Ansip said.
Exascale supercomputers will constitute the next generation of machines, capable of performing 1018 operations per second. The first ones are expected to come into operation at the beginning of the next decade. The EuroHPC initiative plans to acquire pre-exascale systems (1017 operations per second) and support the development of exascale systems based on European technology to become operational in 2022-2023.
Andrus Ansip highlighted the importance of supercomputers both to ensure that companies are competitive and for ordinary people, and stressed that the demand for supercomputing services that exists today in Europe exceeds the calculation capacity available. Ansip added: “I am absolutely sure that the future of BSC future will be brilliant. Today, MareNostrum 4 supercomputer is the 16th most powerful in the world and I am sure that there will be a MareNostrum 5, that there will be a new-generation supercomputer in Barcelona.”
See video here.
You can read the interview to Andrus Ansip in La Vanguardia here (in Spanish).
