The hosting entities of the EuroHPC partnership signed the agreements, which will allow building and purchasing new supercomputers for Europe in eight countries.
On 27 November, the representatives of the eight EuroHPC hosting entities met to sign their hosting agreements, which will give them the permission to start the procurement process for the acquisition, installation and maintenance of new supercomputers (see news). These supercomputers are expected to become operational as early as the second half of 2020, supporting the work of European academics, industry and the public sector.
EuroHPC is a partnership established as a Joint Undertaking (JU) in 2018 under Horizon 2020 between the European Union (EU) and 29 European countries. It is supported with EUR 1 billion. Switzerland is a member since March 2019, and Macedonia is currently in the process of joining as a 30th Member. The JU is aiming to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe by pooling EU and national resources. Earlier this year, eight sites in eight different Member State countries were chosen for supercomputing centres hosting new machines. The signature of the respective agreements now marks a new milestone in the JU, which should remain operational until 2026. According to European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel (in November still in charge of Digital Economy and Society), the EuroHPC activities bring Europe a step closer to becoming a global leader in high-performance computing.
The EuroHPC is also included on the list of institutionalised European partnershipsproposed by the European Commission for Horizon Europe as a partnership in the area of high-performance computing. Horizon Europe funding will cover the development of technologies under the partnership. At the same time, it will receive funding from the Digital Europe Programme (DEP), within its strategic objective for high performance computing. The DEP funding stream will be dedicated to large-scale capacity and infrastructure building, including the acquisition and deployment of the systems. In particular, an HPC competence centre shall be set up that would network the supercomputing centres with industry, academia, and public administrations.