PURPOSE: to establish a European Joint Undertaking for
High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) during the period
2019-2026.
PROPOSED ACT: Council Regulation.
ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: the Council adopts
the act after consulting the European Parliament but without being
obliged to follow the opinion of the European
Parliament.
BACKGROUND: High performance computing (HPC) is
an indispensable tool for addressing major scientific and societal
challenges such as early detection of diseases, forecasting climate
change or the prevention of natural disasters. It has an
increasingly important impact on industries and businesses as it
reduces design and production cycles. Lastly, it is essential for
national security and defence.
At present, the supercomputers available in the
Union do not satisfy demand. European scientists and industry
are increasingly processing their data outside the EU. This lack of
independence can create problems, especially with regard to the
protection of personal data and the ownership of data, in
particular for sensitive applications such as health.
Since 2012, the Commission has been promoting EU
initiatives in this area:
- on 19 April 2016, the Commission adopted the European
Cloud Initiative, as part of its Digitising
European Industry strategy. This involves the Commission and
the Member States creating a leading European HPC and big data
ecosystem, underpinned by a world-class HPC, data and network
infrastructure;
- on 23 March 2017, at the Digital Day in Rome, seven
Member States (France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Portugal and Spain) signed the EuroHPC declaration. They were
subsequently joined by Belgium, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland,
Greece and Croatia. These 13 countries agreed to work together and
with the Commission to acquire and deploy, by 2022/2023, a
pan-European integrated exascale supercomputing infrastructure
(EuroHPC) (i.e. at least 10 to the power of 18 or 1 billion
calculations per second), which is expected to be reached around
2021-2022.
The EuroHPC initiative will enable Member States to
coordinate together with the Commission their HPC investments and
strategies. The end goal is to establish in the EU a
world-class HPC and data infrastructure that Member States on their
own cannot afford.
IMPACT ASSESSMENT: the chosen option is that of the
creation of a Joint Undertaking providing a legal,
contractual and organisational common framework to structure the
joint commitments entered into by its participating members. It
also provides its members with a firm governance structure and
budgetary certainty. It can:
- implement joint procurement and operate world-class
HPC systems via the promotion of (in particular European)
technology;
- as the owner of the pre-exascale supercomputers funded
jointly by its members and so facilitate non-discriminatory access
to them;
- launch R&D&I programmes for developing
technologies and their subsequent integration in European exascale
supercomputing systems.
CONTENT: the proposed Regulation aims to establish a
‘European Joint Undertaking for High Performance
Computing’ for a period until 31 December 2026.
The key objective is to provide European scientists,
businesses and the public sector with the latest data and HPC
infrastructures and to support the development of its technologies
and its applications across a wide range of fields. The following
activities are provided to this effect:
- provide a framework for acquisition of an integrated
world-class pre-exascale supercomputing and data infrastructure in
the Union: in 2019-2020, the Joint
Undertaking will procure two world-class pre-exascale machines of a
few hundred petaflops and co-finance the acquisition of at least
two additional machines of the order of a few tens of petaflops; it
will manage access to these supercomputers for a wide range of
public and private users starting in 2020;
- support the research and development of an integrated
High Performance Computing ecosystem in the Union covering all scientific and industrial
value chain segments notably hardware, software, applications,
services, engineering, interconnections, know-how and
skills.
Governance of the Joint Undertaking: the Joint Undertaking governance shall be assured by
two bodies: a Governing Board, and an Industrial and Scientific
Advisory Board. The Governing board should be composed of
Representatives of the Union and Participating States. It should be
responsible for strategic policy making and funding decisions
related to the activities of the Joint Undertaking, in particular
for all the public procurement activities. The Industrial and
Scientific Advisory Board should include representatives of
academia and industry as users and technology suppliers.
Financing: the Union's
financial contribution to the Joint Undertaking would be up to a
maximum of EUR 486 million under the current multiannual
financial framework, broken down as follows: (i) EUR 386
million from the Horizon
2020 programme; (ii) EUR 100 million from the Connecting
Europe Facility (CEF). This contribution shall be matched by
Participating States and the Private Members of the EuroHPC Joint
Undertaking.