At a press conference on 29 September 2020, the Prime Minister, Minister of State, Xavier Bettel, and the Minister of the Economy, Franz Fayot, together with the Executive Director of EuroHPC, Anders Jensen, and the management of LuxProvide, presented the progress of the Luxembourg supercomputer project, which integrates the European supercomputer network.
"I am proud to announce today the acquisition by Luxembourg of a supercomputer that will bear the name MeluXina. This new supercomputer will be inaugurated in the spring of 2021 and made available to the economy and research. We will put a particular focus on its use by SMEs, start-ups and health services (eHealth) in order to strengthen national and European innovation. I am particularly pleased that the Grand Duchy has also been selected as the headquarters of the entity managing the new European supercomputer network, "
Economics Minister Franz Fayot commented: "This flagship project to support the digitalization of our economy and our companies fits perfectly into the data-driven innovation strategy of the Ministry of Economics. Our Luxembourg supercomputer MeluXina contributes to the implementation of a sustainable and reliable digital economy by making high-performance computing accessible to companies of all sizes.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, headquartered in the Grand Duchy, is an initiative co-funded by the European Commission and 32 countries, including Luxembourg, which aims to develop an ecosystem and infrastructure of supercomputers in Europe. The MeluXina project for a Luxembourg petascal supercomputer, to be implemented by LuxProvide in the LuxConnect data center in Bissen, has been selected in 2019 by EuroHPC to be part of a European network of supercomputers and to benefit from a co-financing of approximately 35%. On 28 September 2020, the contract for the acquisition of the supercomputer from the French company Atos was signed by LuxProvide, jointly with EuroHPC, for an amount of EUR 30.4 million.
EuroHPC's Executive Director Anders Jensen commented: "By early next year, the MeluXina supercomputer will boost European innovation and competitiveness and support European researchers and industry players, wherever they are in Europe. But MeluXina also has a very special significance for us because it is the first EuroHPC contract signature and this supercomputer will be located in Luxembourg, the participating country hosting the EuroHPC headquarters!".
The Luxembourg supercomputer MeluXina, with a computing power of 10 petaflops/second (corresponding to 10,000,000,000,000 computing operations per second), is focused on the needs of companies, particularly SMEs and start-ups, which is unique within the European supercomputer network. With its modular architecture, it can be used in a wide range of sectors and for a variety of applications. It can thus best support the digitization and innovative projects of Luxembourg companies for applications involving modeling, research, development of new products, forecasting or even Big Data.
MeluXina is due to be launched in the spring of 2021, by which time around 20 people will be working for LuxProvide to operate and market the supercomputer and provide the services of the competence center. Indeed, to facilitate the use of MeluXina's capabilities, a dedicated skills center will guide and support companies so that they can articulate their projects in order to make the best possible use of large-scale computing capacity.
