Concept
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe. Germany's JUWELS (booster module) is the fastest European supercomputer in 7th place (followed by Italian Eni company supercomputer) in November 2020, and Switzerland's Piz Daint was the fastest European supercomputer, in October 2016, ranked 3rd in the world with a peak of over 25 petaflops. In June 2011, France's Tera 100 was certified the fastest supercomputer in Europe, and ranked 9th in the world at the time (has now dropped off the list). It was the first petascale supercomputer designed and built in Europe. There are several efforts to coordinate European leadership in high-performance computing. The ETP4HPC Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) outlines a technology roadmap for exascale in Europe, with a key motivation being an increase in the global market share of the HPC technology developed in Europe. The Eurolab4HPC Vision provides a long-term roadmap, covering the years 2023 to 2030, with the aim of fostering academic excellence in European HPC research. There have been several projects to organise supercomputing applications within Europe. The first was the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA). This ran from 2002–2011. The organisation of supercomputing has been taken over by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE). From 2018-2026 further supercomputer development is taking place under the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertakingwithin the Horizon 2020 framework.
