Lithuania has signed the EuroHPC declaration. It is the seventeenth European country to become part of this national and European effort to build world-class high performance computing and data infrastructures, to be made available to researchers, the public sector, and industry across Europe.

Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, and Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, welcomed Lithuania’s signature:

We are very pleased to welcome Lithuania into this ambitious European project. To be in the driving seat for HPC and maintain our data sovereignty, Europe needs to foster more collaboration and coordination. By pooling European and national HPC resources, we will be able to build a world-class supercomputing and data infrastructure, covering the full value chain from technology components to systems and machines, and to applications and skills. The European HPC and infrastructure that we plan to build will have a direct positive impact in areas like personalised and precision medicine, simulation in climate change and better water and agricultural resources opening the way to new innovative applications to benefit all European citizens.

Signing the declaration, Lithuania’s Minister of Education and Science Jurgita Petrauskienė said:

It is in Lithuania’s interest to join the European High Performance Computing Initiative (EuroHPC). This will allow our country to take advantage of the most advanced high performance computing capabilities available. It is also extremely important to emphasise how the success of EuroHPC is dependent on measures for exchange of knowledge, skills and scientific expertise in the field of HPC between Member States.

By joining the EuroHPC declaration, Lithuania has announced its intention to join the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) proposed by the European Commission on 11 January 2018, once it is formally adopted by the Council of the European Union.

The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity that aims to create the right conditions for a world-class high performance computing (HPC) ecosystem in the EU, which will meet the demands of public and private users, make sure that all areas of industry can benefit from HPC technologies, and ensure that key knowledge and skills are fostered and remain in Europe.

The JU will pool EU and national resources with the goal of:

acquiring and providing across Europe by 2020 a world-class pre-exascale supercomputing infrastructure, capable of a hundred million billion or 10 17 calculations per second, in order to match the demanding application requirements of European academic and industrial users;

calculations per second, in order to match the demanding application requirements of European academic and industrial users; supporting the development of European supercomputing technology, including the first generation of European low-power microprocessor technology and the co-design of European exascale machines (capable of at least a billion billion or 10 18 calculations per second);

calculations per second); fostering applications and skills development and the wider use of high-performance computing.

With a total budget of approximatively €1 billion, the JU is expected to start operating in 2019 and to continue to the end of 2026, with infrastructure to be jointly owned and operated by its members. Access will be granted to all European users under fair and transparent conditions, regardless of their location.

Background

The EuroHPC declaration was originally launched in March 2017 during the Digital Day and signed by France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Since then, Belgium, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Poland have joined them.

HPC , also known as supercomputing, is at the core of major advances and innovation in the digital age. Supercomputers, which can process large amounts of data and carry out complex computations, are being used more and more to address major scientific, industrial and societal challenges in many areas, from health, personalised medicine, climate change and renewable energy to sustainable agriculture, automotive engineering, aerospace, cybersecurity and defence.

More information on the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking: