As part of the European High Performance Computing (HPC) project, the European Commission has today proposed to establish the headquarters of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking in Luxembourg; as a new legal and financial structure, EuroHPC will acquire, set up and deploy an integrated pan-European supercomputer infrastructure across Europe.
The EuroHPC initiative is a concrete follow-up to the declaration signed in March 2017 in Rome by Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands to kick off official strategy for the implementation of a European HPC network for which the Grand Duchy was the initiator. In 2017, Belgium, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece and Croatia joined the initiative.
Upon its establishment in Luxembourg in the second half of 2018, the EuroHPC operational structure will also support a research and innovation programme to develop the technologies and machines (hardware) as well as the applications (software) that operate on these supercomputers. to process several billion calculations per second. By 2020, about €1 billion of public funds will be invested in the EuroHPC initiative. The EU contribution will be in the order of €486 million, complemented by a similar amount from the Member States and associated countries which, together with the European Commission, are the shareholders of this common structure.
Used for numerical simulations in the industrial, scientific or medical field, high performance computing requires so much resources that calculations can not be done using general purpose computers. The EuroHPC initiative will eventually bring the computing capabilities needed by companies, research centers and universities to ensure the EU's competitiveness in the context of the development of the digital economy in Europe.
Luxembourg's Prime Minister and Minister of State, Xavier Bettel, said "The Commission's proposal to host the EuroHPC structure in Luxembourg confirms the attractiveness of the Grand Duchy as an innovating country, in line with the resources deployed at national level. As part of the Digital Lëtzebuerg initiative, Luxembourg is also ready to play a pioneering, constructive and participatory role in the implementation of the Digital Agenda for Europe."
The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy, Étienne Schneider, said "The proposal to host in Luxembourg the structure deploying the European infrastructure of world-class supercomputers confirms the reputation of our country as a "smart nation", ready for a digital society. Through the HPC, we enable all economic players in the Grand Duchy, especially innovative companies, to access a large amount of computing power to innovate and grow. It is also an indispensable tool in the context of the Rifkin strategy."
