Supercomputing in Europe

An SGI Altix supercomputer at the CINES facility in France

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.[1]

According to the TOP500 list of November 2023, Finland's LUMI is the fastest European supercomputer, followed by Italy's Leonardo.[2] Germany's JUWELS (booster module)[3] was the fastest European supercomputer in 7th place (followed by Italian Eni company supercomputer) in November 2020, and Switzerland's Piz Daint was the fastest European supercomputer, in October 2016, ranked 3rd in the world with a peak of over 25 petaflops.[4]

In June 2011, France's Tera 100 was certified the fastest supercomputer in Europe, and ranked 9th in the world at the time (has now dropped off the list).[5][6][7][8] It was the first petascale supercomputer designed and built in Europe.[9]

There are several efforts to coordinate European leadership in high-performance computing. The ETP4HPC Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) outlines a technology roadmap for exascale in Europe, with a key motivation being an increase in the global market share of the HPC technology developed in Europe.[10] The Eurolab4HPC Vision provides a long-term roadmap, covering the years 2023 to 2030, with the aim of fostering academic excellence in European HPC research.[11]

  1. ^ Talia, Domenico (2008). Grid Middleware and Services: Challenges and Solutions. New York: Springer. pp. 109–110. ISBN 978-0-387-78445-8.
  2. ^ "TOP500 List - November 2023 | TOP500". www.top500.org. Retrieved 5 February 2024.
  3. ^ "Forschungszentrum Jülich - Press releases - A turbocharger for the supercomputer JUWELS". www.fz-juelich.de. Retrieved 30 November 2020.
  4. ^ "Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect, NVIDIA Tesla P100". TOP500. Retrieved 29 November 2017.
  5. ^ "High performance computing at CEA". CEA. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  6. ^ Brueckner, Rich (21 June 2011). "Tera 100 is Europe's Most Powerful Supercomputer". Inside HPC. Retrieved 10 January 2013.
  7. ^ "TOP500 Supercomputers". TOP500. June 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  8. ^ "World's fastest supercomputers: Tera-100 (France)". CNN Money. 20 June 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  9. ^ "Bull: Tera 100, Europe's most powerful supercomputer, is powered up for the first time". Bloomberg News. 27 May 2010. Archived from the original on 5 November 2012. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  10. ^ etp4hpc. "Home | etp4hpc". www.etp4hpc.eu. Retrieved 6 July 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  11. ^ "Eurolab4HPC Vision - Eurolab4HPC". Eurolab4HPC. Retrieved 6 July 2018.