The European Commission has approved a multi-million funding program for developing applications in High Performance Computing. The funds will be used to help build HPC Centers of Excellence in 10 member countries.
From computing the reduction of noise and fuel for passenger airplanes to assessing the effects of climate change – Applications in High Performance Computing help tackle some of the world’s biggest societal, scientific, and economic challenges. The development of the next generation of supercomputing systems – exascale systems, with computing speeds a billion times higher than current desktop computers – targets the future needs of such applications. However, enabling these applications to effectively use ever larger (and increasingly complex) computing systems is a major milestone which has yet to be achieved, keeping in mind that the first pre- Exascale machines will be available in Europe in 2020 according to the announced EuroHPC1 strategy.
After an investment of 42 M€ in 2015, the European Commission confirmed its support with an additional budget of 74 M€ in December 2018 resulting in 10 operational European HPC Centres of Excellence (CoEs) for computing applications.
Newly launched HPC Centers of Excellence:
Continuing HPC Centers of Excellence:
FocusCoE contributes to the success of the EU HPC Ecosystem and the EuroHPC Initiative by supporting the EU HPC CoEs to more effectively fulfill their role within the ecosystem and initiative, thus ensuring that extreme scale applications result in tangible benefits for addressing scientific, industrial or societal challenges.
Achieving excellence in HPC Applications takes a pivotal place – it is the applications that deliver solutions to the aforementioned challenges – in the European HPC Ecosystem alongside the development of Exascale technologies and provision of access to extreme-scale infrastructure. Simultaneously, FocusCoE has been selected as a Coordination and Support Action (CSA) in order to support these CoEs in their mission to contribute to a globally competitive HPC ecosystem. The launch of the new HPC Centers of Excellence continues to support the key role of applications and this is expected to be a crucial element within the EuroHPC Program.
