On the occasion of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Rome Treaty, the European Commission organized “Digital Day”. This was a high-level meeting on 23 March, 2017, in the Italian capital confirming the ambition to position the EU amongst the top global rankings in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC) and establishing a transnational framework for connected driving tests.
Luxembourg’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy, Etienne Schneider, signed the European HPC cooperation declaration on behalf of Luxembourg. The EuroHPC declaration signatory ceremony marked the official starting point for the collaboration between the signatory states (Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands) for the strategic set-up of a European HPC network initiated by Luxembourg.
The HPC project is of strategic interest for the implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy. It will ultimately provide the computing capabilities needed to ensure the EU's competitiveness as a digital economy.
By 2018, Luxembourg will acquire an HPC (High Performance Computer) with the power of one petaflop per second, which corresponds to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one thousand trillion) calculations per second.
During the signatory ceremony, Minister Schneider declared: “Setting up an independent European digital industry and our own value chain around data, software and hardware is indispensable. It is one of the key objectives of the Important Project of Common European Interest on HPC that Luxembourg is involved in alongside other Member States and that we want to push forward together.”
In parallel, Minister Etienne Schneider signed a letter of intent to formalize the collaboration of several Member States – including Luxembourg – in the field of smart mobility, in particular regarding the development of connected and autonomous vehicles. Luxembourg’s objective is to participate in this way in the European strategy for the mobility of tomorrow.
The topic of industry 4.0 was also at the centre of the discussions during “Digital Day” in Rome aiming to highlight the digital future of Europe. FEDIL participated actively in these debates and strives, together with the Ministry of the Economy, to position the Luxembourg industry as a sector of activity at the cutting edge of new technology and digitalization. The Director of FEDIL, René Winkin, commented: “All the initiatives that Etienne Schneider has just supported in the context of ‘Digital Day’ in Rome are of great importance to our federation and its members. We are delighted that we, in close collaboration with the Ministry of the Economy, have managed to promote the digitalization of the Luxembourg industry by putting in place the national platform ‘Digital4Industry’. This platform allows us to participate at the official launch of its European counterpart ‘European Industry 4.0’ which will promote joint investments as well as cross-border and inter-sector cooperation.”
