The nation of Turkey has joined the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. Established in November 2018, the joint initiative aims to develop a supercomputing ecosystem in Europe, building top-of-the-range machines and helping researchers, industry and small and medium-sized enterprises to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to make use of them.
The fact that Turkey has become part of the Joint Undertaking underlines the international significance of our supercomputing plans,” said Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. “They will bring together researchers across national borders, and enable Europe to become a global leader in supercomputing.”
The goals of EuroHPC JU are:
- Acquiring and providing across Europe by 2020 a world-class pre-exascale supercomputing infrastructure, in order to match the demanding application requirements of European academic and industrial users (exascale systems can perform a billion billion or 1018 calculations per second)
- Supporting the development of European supercomputing technology, including the first generation of European low-power microprocessor technology and the co-design of European exascale machines
- Fostering applications and skills development and the wider use of high performance computing
Supercomputing is a key element of scientific and industrial innovation,” said Fatih Kacır, Turkey’s Deputy Minister of Industry and Technology. “It is clear that global economies investing in supercomputers are the economies that will gain the greatest competitive advantage and provide the greatest economic benefit over time. Turkey has been investing into high performance computing for over 15 years with the Turkish Science e-Infrastructure (TRUBA) but like all countries, Turkey needs to invest more considering the fact that many of Turkey’s 200,000 national researchers will need high performance computational facilities in the near future. For that reason, I am very excited for ambitious plans of EuroHPC to build a world-class European supercomputing infrastructure and being part of this initiative. I am confident that cutting-edge research will be powered by providing Turkish researchers in science and industry with access to EuroHPC. This initiative will put all members at a leading position in HPC technologies.”
Turkey’s TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM High Performance and Grid Computing Center is a national center providing high performance computing and data storage for all research institutions and researchers in Turkey for the last 15 years. This center is known as the Turkish National e-Science e-Infrastructure (TRUBA). TUBITAK ULAKBIM has over 2200 researchers from 120 different universities using its HPC resources. It has participated in 13 different EU Framework projects and has been a long-time member of EGI and GEANT.
