An article posted on the European Commission's website last Friday and written by European Commissioner Günther H. Oettinger and Deputy Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Étienne Schneider, has paved a way forward in a European supercomputer project.

The post provided an outline of the Important Project of Common European Interest (ICPEI) concerning the implementation in Europe of a supercomputer (HPC) and compatible Big Data applications. As the statement explained, Europe currently holds but one supercomputing facility in the global top 10 supercomputers, "falling behind in both HPC and Big data" in comparison to the 5 hosted by the US and China which soars above the competition.

"To develop the HPC, we need several billion euros - an amount no individual Member State can or is willing to finance on its own," the authors continued. "We have thus to join forces to close the investment gap by bringing together regional and national funding with complementary European funding mechanisms."

The IPCEI project is a result of Luxembourg's collaboration with France, Italy and Spain in this domain, aimed at delivering a significant contribution to economic growth, job creation and Europe's competitiveness in industry and economy.

In turn, the European Commission will soon be launching an initiative to address a world-class data and computing infrastructure deployment, entitled the European Cloud Initiative. Luxembourg, France, Italy and Spain, as well as other Members States, will then provide the European Council with a roadmap for the implementation of the supercomputer HPC and compatible Big Data applications, and HPC actors in Luxembourg coordinating this project, along with the Ministry of the Economy, Luxinnovation and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), will then have until September to submit their project.

"We welcome and applaud an IPCEI in HPC and strongly believe that it is a powerful vehicle to build a strong European ecosystem, comprising the whole value chain - from hardware to architecture and software development," Commissioner Oettinger and Minister Schneider wrote.

 

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