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PDC Center for High Performance Computing

EuroHPC & Sweden

Lilit Axner, PDC

The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking ( eurohpc-ju.europa.eu ) or EuroHPC JU, is a one billion EUR joint initiative between the EU and various European countries to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe. The members of the joint undertaking are the following:

  • the European Union, which is represented by the European Commission;
  • Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey; and
  • the European Technology Platform for High-Performance Computing (ETP4HPC) Association plus the Big Data Value Association (BDVA).

The EuroHPC JU enables the EU and participating countries to coordinate their efforts and share resources with the objective of deploying a world-class supercomputing infrastructure and a competitive innovation ecosystem in super-computing technologies, applications and skills in Europe.

The Joint Undertaking intends to pool EU and national resources in high-performance computing with the aims of:

  • acquiring and providing a world-class petascale and pre-exascale supercomputing and data infrastructure for Europe's academic, industrial and public users, matching their demanding application requirements by 2021 (This would be widely available to users from the public and private sectors, to be used primarily for research purposes.), and
  • supporting an ambitious research and innovation agenda to develop and maintain a world-class high-performance computing ecosystem (exascale and beyond) in the EU covering all scientific and industrial value chain segments including low-power processor and middleware technologies, algorithms and code design, applications and systems, services and engineering, interconnections, know-how and skills for the next-generation supercomputing era.

To accomplish the first goal, the EuroHPC JU has been permitted to buy and install three pre-exascale machines by 2021. The systems will be located in Finland, Spain and Italy but, even though the machines will be situated in those particular countries, they will each be hosted by a consortium of several countries.

The system that will be based in Finland is called LUMI and is being hosted by a consortium of the following countries: Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. This means that a part of LUMI will be available to Swedish researchers, both in academia and industry, in a manner similar to that of Swedish national HPC resources. (For more details, see this article  earlier in the newsletter.)

In addition to the three pre-exascale systems, the EuroHPC JU will be buying five petascale machines that will be sited in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Luxemburg, Portugal and Slovenia.

These machines will be interconnected with the existing national supercomputers and will be made available throughout Europe, to public and private users for developing leading scientific and industrial applications.

To reach its second goal, the EuroHPC JU has launched calls for proposals to fund research and innovation activities that will help Europe to remain globally competitive in the field of supercomputing. One of the aims of these calls is to support existing HPC competence centres or the creation of up to one national HPC competence centre in each of the EU member states and EuroHPC JU participating states.

Many countries jointly applied for this call. Out of these, applications from 31 countries have been accepted and one of these successful applications is from Sweden – its goal is to establish a national HPC competence centre in Sweden.

The national HPC competence centres should provide HPC services to industry (including to SMEs), academia and public administration organisations, as well as delivering tailored/modular solutions for a wide variety of users, in such a way as to ease and foster the transition towards the wider uptake of HPC in Europe. These centres should be the focal points coordinating all national initiatives, facilitating access for national stakeholders to European HPC competence and opportunities in different industrial sectors and domains. These national HPC competence centres are expected to open in September 2020.