The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking was established in 2018, in order to enable the EU to become a world leader in supercomputing. A new EuroHPC Regulation for the continuation of the Joint Undertaking in the 2021-2027 budgetary period is currently being discussed at EU level, and is expected to enter into force in the coming months. It will make possible a further investment of €7 billion in the next generation of European supercomputers, including emerging technologies, such as exascale, post-exascale and quantum computers and an ambitious R&I programme. The EuroHPC supercomputers and quantum computers will be accessible and available to European researchers, industry (including SMEs), and public administrations no matter where they are located in Europe. The EuroHPC supercomputers will be a strategic resource, with the potential to unlock significant advances in bio-engineering, weather forecasting, the fight against climate change, personalized medicine, as well as in the discovery of new materials and new drugs, yielding a wide range of benefits for EU citizens.
The Joint Undertaking is already equipping the EU with a world-class infrastructure of pre-exascale and petascale supercomputers, and developing the necessary technologies, applications and skills for reaching full exascale capabilities (performance level capable of executing ten to the power of eighteen operations per second) by 2023. To date, one supercomputer is operational in Slovenia (Vega); another one (MeluXina) will be officially inaugurated in Luxembourg on 7 June 2021. Five more EuroHPC supercomputers have been procured and will be operational in 2021: Discoverer (Bulgaria), Karolina (Czech Republic), Deucalion (Portugal), Leonardo (Italy), and Lumi (Finland). Moreover, through its research and innovation agenda, the EuroHPC JU is also strengthening the European knowledge base in HPC technologies and bridging the digital skills gap, notably through the creation of a network of national HPC Competence Centres as well as fostering HPC uptake by SMEs.