Turkey and Croatia will become part of the consortium to build and manage the supercomputer, and Ireland has expressed its support for the candidacy.
The new consortium members join Spain and Portugal, in addition to the support of the regional Catalan government and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia as BSC shareholders.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has presented its candidacy to host one of the pre-exascale supercomputers that will be operational in the European Union in 2021, a decision that it announced on March 24th.
During the preparation of the proposal, three additional countries have committed their support to BSC’s candidacy. Turkey and Croatia will become members of the consortium that will build and manage the supercomputer together with Spain, Portugal, and the European Commission. Ireland will also support the proposal and remains open to the possibility of joining the consortium in the future. The regional Catalan government and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia also support the proposal as BSC shareholders.
The BSC-CNS proposal is a response to the European Commission’s call for expression of interest to host one of the “at least” two pre-exascale supercomputers that will receive 50% EU funding. These supercomputers must have a peak speed of at least 200 petaflops/s, meet the needs of a wide range of applications, and be in operation by the fourth quarter of 2020.
This call for expression of interest is the result of the agreement between 28 participating countries and the European Commission to co-finance a European Roadmap for High Performance Computing (HPC). The roadmap is intended to promote the development of European HPC technologies and build at least two pre-exascale supercomputers that will come into operation by the end of 2020. In addition, at least two exascale supercomputers are foreseen to come into operation in 2023.
This initiative is being carried out by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC-JU), the body created by the Commission and the participating countries to manage the roadmap. It is expected to announce its decision regarding the entities selected to host the pre-exascale supercomputers on June 7th.
Further information here.