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European high-performance computing system, HPC closely cooperates with the business and industrial sectors to drive breakthrough innovation and enhance the EU competitiveness in the world. Besides, established HPCs can be used by all interested partners, e.g. AI start-ups and businesses to train their models, thus boosting innovation in AI and the digital socio-economic platforms.
The Euro-HPC Joint Undertaking, Euro-HPC is a regulatory and funding entity created in 2018 to enable the EU states to increase efficiency and pool their resources with the following objectives:
= to develop, deploy, extend and maintain a secure system of hyper-connected supercomputing, quantum computing, service and data infrastructures;
= to support the development and uptake of demand-oriented and user-driven innovative and competitive supercomputing and quantum computing systems based on a supply chain that will ensure the availability of components, technologies and knowledge; and
= to widen the use of established supercomputing and quantum computing infrastructure to a large number of public and private users.
More in: https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/3-eurohpc-supercomputers-make-global-top-10-worlds-most-powerful-supercomputers-2023-11-13_en
Modern EU supercomputers
In order to equip Europe with a world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, the Euro-HPC JU has already procured nine supercomputers, including Jupiter (EU’s first “exascale supercomputer”), Lumi (number 5 in the world), Leonardo (number 6), Marenostrum-5 (number 8), Meluxina, Karolina, Discover, Jules Verne and Vega.
European scientists, as well as companies, national governance bodies, public-private sector and industry can benefit from using these Euro-HPC supercomputers, which rank among most powerful in the world.
European world-class supercomputers are able presently perform more than one million billion, operations per second (petascale performance); some few top-of-the-range systems exceed one hundred million billion operations per second, i.e. through the so-called pre-exascale performance.
Next generation computers (e.g. exascale) will perform more than one billion billion operations per second, a computing power level comparable to aggregating the computing capabilities of the mobile phones of the EU’s entire population. Europe’s first, Jupiter was operational in mid-2023.
As part of the EU-wide digital decade, high performance computing, HPC becomes extremely vital to the member states’ future socio-economic performance, prosperity, digital transformation and resilience. With €7 billion in funding from Horizon Europe, the Digital Europe Program and the Connecting Europe Facility the Commission is strengthening investments in supercomputing: it aims to build up supercomputing and data processing capacities by buying world- class exascale supercomputers, post exascale facilities, and supporting an ambitious HPC research and innovation agenda.
HPC can be used in a large number of application areas: from monitoring and mitigating the effects of climate change and producing safer and greener vehicles to increasing cybersecurity and advancing the frontiers of knowledge in nearly every scientific field.
Moreover, HPC has proved to be of great importance in developing new applications and products. It has a direct impact on the digital supply chain, such as designing new materials, cars and airplanes, bioengineering and manufacturing, etc.
Source: European Commission High-Performance Computing in https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/high-performance-computing
All operational Euro-HPC supercomputers have been ranked on the top 200 supercomputers worldwide: e.g. supercomputer MareNostrum-5 becomes in 2023 the global TOP500 list at 8th place, joining two other European “supers”, e.g. LUMI and Leonardo in the global top 10. Other Euro-HPC supercomputers also remain ranked amongst the world’s most powerful units.
European supercomputing resources will play a pivotal role in the creation and training of extensive foundational AI models.
HPCs will foster trustworthy AI in the EU-27: these efforts will aim to facilitate increased accessibility for AI communities and promote the optimal and efficient use of HPC technologies for scientific, research and industrial innovation.
Source: the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking and https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/3-eurohpc-supercomputers-make-global-top-10-worlds-most-powerful-supercomputers-2023-11-13_en