As part of the European High Performance Computing (HPC) project, the European Commission has finally decided on June 25 to establish the EuroHPC Joint Headquarters in Luxembourg. As a new legal and financial structure, EuroHPC will oversee from the Grand Duchy the pooling of resources to develop and set up a European network of supercomputers.
This network will ultimately provide the computational capabilities needed by companies, research centers and universities to ensure the EU's competitiveness in the context of the development of the digital economy in Europe. It is planned to equip the EU with a pre-exascale and petascale infrastructure (1015 calculation operations per second) by 2020 and to develop the technologies and applications needed to reach the exascale level (1018 calculation operations per second). ) by 2023. The EuroHPC initiative is a concrete follow-up to the declaration signed in March 2017 in Rome by Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands to kick off an official strategy for the implementation of a European HPC network for which the Grand Duchy was the initiator. In 2017, Belgium, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece and Croatia joined the initiative.
By 2020, the EuroHPC structure will manage from Luxembourg about 1 billion euros of public funds that will be invested in the initiative. The EU contribution will be in the order of € 486 million, complemented by a similar amount from the Member States and associated countries, which together with the European Commission, are the shareholders of this common structure.
To built an European network of supercomputers, Luxembourg will be equipped by 2019 with its own supercomputer that will be connected to the future EuroHPC network and whose installation will benefit from a European co-financing up to 35%.
Prime Minister and Minister of State Xavier Bettel said: "The decision of the Commission to host the EuroHPC structure in Luxembourg confirms the attractiveness of the Grand Duchy as an innovative country. In line with the resources deployed at national level under the Digital Luxembourg initiative, Luxembourg is ready to once again play a pioneering, constructive and participatory role in the implementation of the Digital Agenda for Europe.
"The choice of Luxembourg, as the seat of the European structure EuroHPC puts the Grand Duchy at the heart of the development of the digital economy in Europe and will strengthen in same time the national infrastructures necessary for the implementation of the strategy of the Third Industrial Revolution."