The EuroHPC project is concretizing plans for the first exascale HPC system in Europe. Countries and organizations can submit applications to host the system.
Europe lags behind the US, China and Japan in supercomputing. The world’s most powerful systems come mainly from those countries, with only a modest role for HPC installations in the EU. That needs to change. The EuroHPC initiative’s ambition is to boost supercomputing in Europe. One of the main goals of the initiative is to build an exascale supercomputer in the EU by 2023.
Several countries including the US and China already have concrete plans for exascale systems. These are systems with computing power of 1,000 petaFlops or more. Floating point operations per second are a measure of how many calculations a computer can make per second. The most powerful operational supercomputer in Europe is currently in Germany. That system (the JUWELS Booster Module) has a computing power of 44 PFlops. So the leap to an exascale system is a big one.
Introducing
The EuroHPC initiative is accepting proposals from European sites interested in hosting the first exascale system until Monday, Feb. 14. Proposals can come from individual countries or a consortium of states. Specifically, only existing HPC centers stand a chance, as the EuroHPC initiative requires a mature site that can provide 20 MW to 25 MW of power, support liquid cooling and have 700 square meters of suitable data center space.
EuroHPC will cover up to 50 percent of the cost of building and maintaining the system. The rest will come from the member states themselves. Participants must indicate how they expect to accomplish the exascale system.
Lumi
EuroHPC is not at its experimental stage, already acting as a driving force behind so-called pre-exascale systems. These are supercomputers with computing power expressed in petaFlops that will nonetheless garner a high spot in the Top 500 when completed. One such system is the LUMI supercomputer. It will have a peak performance of 554 petaFlops and is being built in Finland with Belgian help and others.