Roundup: EU plans initiative to enhance super computing capabilities

BRUSSELS, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission on Thursday announced a plan to invest 1 billion euros (1.19 billion U.S. dollars) in European Union (EU) member states to build a world-class European supercomputers infrastructure.

The new initiative, called Euro High-Performance Computing (HPC) Joint Undertaking, will operate from 2019 to the end of 2026.

The Commission said on Thursday that 1 billion euros of public funding would be invested by 2020 to acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class HPC infrastructure.

Activities include acquisition and operation of two supercomputing machines and at least two mid-range supercomputing machines, and a research and innovation program on HPC to support the development of European supercomputing technology, said the statement.

Members of this initiative fall in two categories: public and private members. Public members will be the EU and 13 member states and associated countries who have signed the EuroHPC declaration, while private members will be representatives from HPC and big data stakeholders, including academia and industry.

The initiative is an essential step for the EU's data security and digital single market strategy.

Due to lack of the top notch supercomputers within the bloc, an increasing number of European scientists and industry process data outside of EU. This poses great risks to privacy, data protection, commercial trade secrets, and ownership of data in particular for sensitive applications.

Moreover, the digital single market strategy aims to tear down virtual barriers of its 28 national markets and integrate them into a single one, while HPC is the key for the digitization of industry, innovation and competitiveness, the Commission said.

Pan-European supercomputers infrastructure will benefit industry, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), science, public sector, and especially data protection and security, according to the Commission. Enditem