Supercomputing in Europe
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing.
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).
[7] 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.
From 2018-2026 further supercomputer development is taking place under the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking within the Horizon 2020 framework.
Under Horizon 2020, European HPC Centres of Excellence are being funded to promote Exascale capabilities and scale up existing parallel codes in the domains of renewable energy, materials modelling and design, molecular and atomic modeling, climate change, global system science, and bio-molecular research.
[9][10] In addition to advances being shared with the HPC research community such as the "Putting the Ocean into the Center" visualization[11][12] and progress on the "Digital Twin" that is already being used to run in silico clinical trials,[13][14] EU countries are already beginning to directly benefit from work done by the Centres of Excellence under Horizon 2020: In summer 2021, software from a European Centre of Excellence was used to forecast ash clouds from the La Palma volcano.
[15] Additionally, EU Centres of Excellence are providing support throughout the Covid19 pandemic creating models to guide policy makers, expediting the discovery of possible treatments, and generally facilitating the sharing of research data during the race to understand the corona virus.
[16] [17][18] PRACE provides "access to leading-edge computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level".
The current flagship of the VSC family is VSC-4, a Linux cluster with approximately 790 compute nodes, 37,920 cores and a theoretical peak performance is 3.7 PFlop/s.
The supercomputer is part of an initiative by the Flemish government to provide the researchers in Flanders with a very powerful computing infrastructure.
[30][31][32][33][34][35] A third supercomputer "Hemus", owned by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies was launched on 19 October 2023.
The supercomputer's performance of 3 petaflops will aid in science research, data processing, application development and medical imaging.
The project was completed by HP and is jointly financed by Bulgaria and the European Regional Development Fund for a total cost of €15 million.
[37] They operate the supercomputer "Bura" which consists of 288 computing nodes and has a total of 6912 CPU cores, its peak performance is 233.6 teraflops and it ranked at 440th on the November 2015 TOP500 list.
[41] By the end of 2023, the CSC was operating a new LUMI system at a sustained 380 petaflops, making it the top performing HPC in Europe[42] while awaiting JUPITER's construction as part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking.
The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) operates the Tera 100 machine in the Research and Technology Computing Center in Essonne, Île-de-France.
[49] The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, a supercomputing center in Munich, houses the SuperMUC system, which began operations in 2012 at a processing speed of 3 petaflops.
The system, which was provided by Intel, consists of a cluster of 336 high-performance servers with 13,440 CPU (Central Processing Unit) cores and 64 terabytes of memory for general purpose computations.
As of June 2023, the highest CINECA supercomputer in the TOP500 list (4th place) is Leonardo, an accelerated petascale cluster based on Xeon Platinum processors, NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, and NVIDIA Mellanox HDR100 InfiniBand connectivity with 1,824,768 total cores for 238.70 petaFLOPS (Rmax) and 7,404 kW.
[55] Due to the involvement of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in the main experiments taking place at CERN, Italy also hosts some of the largest nodes of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, including one Tier 1 facility and 11 Tier 2 facilities out of 151 total nodes.
[56][57] The Luxembourg supercomputer Meluxina was officially launched on 7 June 2021 and is part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).
The European Commission funded the other third, with 35% of the computing power to be made available to the 32 countries taking part in the EuroHPC joint venture.
Additionally, the European Grid Infrastructure, a continent-wide distributed computing system, is also headquartered at the Science Park in Amsterdam.
[citation needed] The Slovenian supercomputer Vega was officially launched on 20 April 2021 and is part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).
Vega supercomputer was jointly financed by EuroHPC JU through EU funds and the Institute of Information Science Maribor (IZUM).
[104][105] In addition to DiRAC, STFC operates the JASMIN high performance data analysis facility on behalf of NERC at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
[106] The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, Berkshire, operates a 100-teraflop IBM pSeries-based system.
[109] The University of Bristol, was chosen in 2023 to host the UK's tier one Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR), Isambard-AI, building on the success of GW4's Isambard supercomputer.
[110][111] The UK government has awarded £225 million to Bristol to develop the system, which will be installed in the National Composites Centre, in collaboration with the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Exeter.
[112] The AIRR is also planned to take in the Dawn supercomputer at the University of Cambridge, which was launched in late 2023 with further development expected in 2024.
