Luxemburg has urged the fellow EU member states to join forces for the European supercomputing by higher investments in a development of the High Performance Computing (HPC) technology and Big Data as it has launched its own HPC-Project.
As Europe needs the supercomputing and data facilities, the funding might go into several billion euros and should be split into member states which should come together to this end, it says. Following the example of the EC’s collaboration with Luxemburg, which aims to bring together regional and national finances with complementary European funding mechanisms, the member countries should work together.
Also, it has been pointed out that there is a risk that Europe might fall behind in the area of HPC, Big Data and supercomputing on the global arena, as to this day it only holds one supercomputing facility of the world top 10 supercomputers which positions the continent behind the US and China.
The HPC-project, led and launched by Luxembourg but together with France, Spain and Italy, has been named the “Important Project of Common European Interest” (IPCEI) and is aimed at a development of the High Performance Computing and Big Data enabled applications, it says.
Under the IPCEI project, there is a number of the HPC applications to be rolled out with a focus initially on building “Smart Nation”, but with a possible extension to a series of other initiatives at later date. It will comprise the whole value chain, as it says, from hardware to architecture and software development, with an overriding goal to set up large scale pan-European pilots for Big Data industry across Europe.
To this end, the EC has committed to launch the European Cloud Initiative including a deployment of a computing infrastructure with the HPC layer and cloud where the data for the European research might be stored. This infrastructure will be consequently financed jointly, not by any individual member states, through the coordinated financial instruments.
In September Luxembourg, France, Spain and Italy are expected to provide an implementation roadmap for the HPC and Big Data enabled application to the European Council and European Commission.