The European Commission has announced that it will invest EUR 140 million to fund a series of newly launched projects and centres of excellence in the field of supercomputing, or HPC (High Performance Computing). The funding is part of the Horizon 2020 programme to achieve world-class, extreme scale computing capabilities and will be used to address challenges such as increasing the energy efficiency of HPC systems or making it easier to program and run applications on these complex machines. As part of the HPC push, the EC is helping to fund eight new Centres of Excellence on supercomputing applications and codes.
Coinciding with the funding announcement, the EC published a study showing that Europe has made big progress in the past five years in using supercomputers, narrowing the gap with the US, China and Japan. In November 2010, only nine of the world's 50 most powerful supercomputers were located in Europe. That figure has since more than doubled to 19. However, only one EU-based machine in Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany features in the top 10 and the EC estimates that an additional EUR 3.263 billion of public and private investments is required for Europe to achieve world leadership in HPC by 2020.
