©Silicya Roth
Anders Jensen, what is the task of the EuroHPC JU?
The organization was founded in 2018 as an EU institution – out of the realization that the individual European governments were not able to invest sufficiently in high-performance computing for a long time. This was clearly reflected in the top 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful high-performance computers. Europe was falling further and further behind because national investments were not sufficient for larger systems. The EuroHPC JU should solve this problem: it now pools the resources of the European Union, 33 European countries and three private partners with the aim of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing.
Can you explain the background to us?
We promote and invest in the development of a European ecosystem for supercomputing. The EuroHPC JU therefore procures and installs supercomputers across Europe. European scientists and users from public administration and industry based in the JU’s member countries can benefit from these EuroHPC supercomputers, which are among the most powerful in the world. Not only are we investing in supercomputing capabilities across Europe, we are also funding an ambitious research and innovation program in this area with the aim of developing a complete European supercomputer supply chain: from processors and software to applications running on those systems.
What have you achieved so far?
Since its inception, the EuroHPC JU has significantly increased overall investment in supercomputing in Europe and secured Europe as a world leader. So far, eight high-performance computers have been procured across Europe: in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. Six of them are already in operation and can be used by European researchers. All of these supercomputers are in the top 500 ranking. Two are in the top 5 in the world: “LUMI” in Finland and “Leonardo” in Italy, which take third and fourth place. At the top is the US with the world’s first exascale system: Frontier: a supercomputer that exceeds 1,000 peta-flops, the number of floating-point operations per second. At number 2 is Fugaku in Japan.