EU invests billion euros to get supercomputers in global top 5 5

The European member states have rallied behind the EuroHPC plan of the European Commission. The EU is thus investing one billion euros in supercomputers. The aim is, among other things, to be in the top 5 of supercomputers with two systems.

With the approval of the Council of Ministers, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking can start its work in November. The twenty-five European countries are working together to build a supercomputer and data infrastructure that will give researchers and companies access to supercomputers. Half of the billion euros comes from the EU budget, the other half must be provided by the Member States and another 400 million euros must be raised privately.

Among other things, the initiative should lead to the presence of systems of hundreds of petaflops on European territory. The aim is to have two supercomputers of this caliber in the global top 5. In addition, the goal is to have two more petascale systems in the top 25. These are supercomputers with a computing power of a few petaflops.

Today’s most powerful supercomputer is Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit system, which hit 122.3 petaflops with a peak of 187.7 petaflops in the HPL benchmark for the Top500 list.

According to the European Commission, support for supercomputers in Europe is desperately needed. EU industry would currently use more than 33% of the supercomputing capacity available worldwide, while Europe has only 5% of that capacity.