The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking announced the selection of eight sites for supercomputing centres across the EU. These new supercomputers will be made accessible to European researchers, industry and businesses, to develop new applications in areas such as artificial intelligence and personalised medicine, drug and material design, bio-engineering, weather forecasting, and combatting climate change.
Representatives of these eight sites (hosting entities) today in Strasbourg celebrated the signature of hosting agreements with the EuroHPC JU.
These agreements are contractual documents that define the roles, rights and obligations of each hosting entity. The procurement process for the eight new supercomputers can now begin.
Three of the new machines will be pre-exascale supercomputers (capable of executing more than 150 Petaflops, or 150 million billion calculations per second). They will be located at the following supercomputing centres:
- Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Spain
- CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
- CINECA, Italy, is a hosting entity of "Leonardo"
Next steps
Now that the hosting agreements have been signed, calls for tender for the procurement (acquisition, installation and maintenance) of these eight supercomputers are being published. The call for tender for the procurement of the three pre-exascale supercomputers will be online in the next few days, while the calls for tender for the procurement of the five petascale supercomputers will follow before the end of 2019.
More information on the EuroHPC JU website
The petascale supercomputers are expected to start operating in mid-2020, and the pre-exascale supercomputers to be accessible by the end of 2020.
