EU to set aside EUR 1 billion for supercomputers by 2020

The European Commission has proposed an investment of EUR 1 billion in the infrastructure for top-quality supercomputers by 2020.

The EC says that this step is crucial for the EU's competitiveness and independence in the data economy, as today, European scientists and industry increasingly process their data outside the EU.

This lack of independence threatens privacy, data protection, commercial trade secrets, and ownership of data in particular for sensitive applications.

A new legal and funding structure – the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking – shall acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure.

It will also support a research and innovation program to develop the technologies and machines (hardware) as well as the applications (software) that would run on these supercomputers.

The EU's contribution in EuroHPC will be around EUR 486 million under the current Multiannual Financial Framework, matched by a similar amount from Member States and associated countries.

Overall, around EUR 1 billion of public funding would be invested by 2020, and private members of the initiative would also add in kind contributions.

– Supercomputers are the engine to power the digital economy. It is a tough race and today the EU is lagging behind: we do not have any supercomputers in the world's top-ten. With the EuroHPC initiative we want to give European researchers and companies world-leading supercomputer capacity by 2020 – to develop technologies such as artificial intelligence and build the future's everyday applications in areas like health, security or engineering – said Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will operate in 2019-2026. The planned infrastructure will be jointly owned and operated by its members consisting at first of the countries that have signed the EuroHPC declaration and private members from academia and industry. Other members can join this cooperation at any moment, provided their financial contribution.

The EuroHPC declaration has been signed by 11 EU member states and Switzerland so far.

High-Performance Computing is essential for processing increasingly large amounts of data in many fields, from healthcare and renewable energy to car manufacture and cybersecurity.

For example, car production cycles can be reduced thanks to supercomputers from 60 months to 24 months. HPC is also used for preventing and managing large-scale natural disasters, notably for forecasting the paths which the hurricanes are following or for earthquake simulations.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION Bruxelles

European Commission

EuroHPC

supercomputers

super computers

supercomputer

Euro HPC joint project

Andrus Ansip