BSC highly values the involvement of the EC in this strategic project of vital importance for Europe.
The European Commission (EC) unveiled today its plans to invest jointly with the Member States in building a world-class European supercomputers infrastructure. A new legal and funding structure – the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking – shall acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. BSC, as one of the promoters of this initiative, highly values the involvement of the EC in this strategic project of vital importance for Europe, which also supports a research and innovation programme to develop hardware and software.
In March 2017, Ministers from seven European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) signed in Rome a declaration to support the next generation of computing and data infrastructures, a European project of the size of Airbus in the 1990s and of Galileo in the 2000s. Nowadays, 13 countries have already signed the declaration.
Today's step is crucial for the EU's competitiveness and independence in the data economy. Today, European scientists and industry increasingly process their data outside the EU because their needs are not matched by the computation time or computer performance available in the EU. This lack of independence threatens privacy, data protection, commercial trade secrets, and ownership of data in particular for sensitive applications.