(20 October 21017) – Switzerland is the 11th country to sign the EuroHPC declaration on high-performance computing (HPC) that aims at developing a world-class supercomputing infrastructure based on European technology, a project of the size of Airbus in the 1990s and of Galileo in the 2000s.
An integrated world-class high-performance computing infrastructure capable of at least 1018 calculations per second (so-called exascale computers) will additionally benefit the daily lives of European citizens: for example, from personalised medicine to safer transport systems or increased online fraud detection.
The European Commission published today the first results of the public consultation on high-performance computing. The respondents identified three main problems as harming the HPC development in Europe: limited interaction between industry and academia, deep fragmentation of HPC programmes and Europe’s dependency on non-EU suppliers for critical technologies and systems. The lack of sufficient resources and insufficient access to HPC resources for science were also flagged during the consultation.
The EuroHPC declaration was originally launched and signed in Rome in March 2017 by France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Belgium signed the declaration in June 2017, Slovenia in July 2017, and Bulgaria last week. All other Member States are invited to join in the future.