The HPC-Europa programmes are

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been ...

(EU) funded research initiatives in the field of

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...

(HPC). The programmes concentrate on the development of a European Research Area, and in particular, improving the ability of European researchers to access the European supercomputing infrastructure provided by the programmes' partners. The programme is currently in its third iteration, known as "HPC-Europa3" or "HPCE3", and fully titled the "Transnational Access Programme for a Pan-European Network of HPC Research Infrastructures and Laboratories for scientific computing".

History

HPC-Europa1

The original HPC-Europa programme (HPC-Europa1), operated between 1 January 2004 and 31 December 2007 under the EU's sixth

Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...

, (FP6). The programme had the goals of improving trans-national access to high-performance computing infrastructure for European researchers by the funding of visitations, creating new methods for accessing the resources of grid computing systems, and devising new methods of measuring the performance of research programmes being undertaken on supercomputers. The HPC-Europa1 programme had a budget of 14.2 million

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, of which approximately 13 million euros came from the

EU budget The Budget of the European Union (EU budget) is used to finance EU funding programmes (such as the European Regional Development Fund, the Cohesion Fund, Horizon Europe, or Erasmus+) and other expenditure at the European level. The EU budge ...

. An initial tranche of funding of 1.6 million euros (of which 1.5 million was from the EU budget) was provided between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2008.

HPC-Europa2

The second HPC-Europa programme (HPC-Europa2) operated between 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2012, under the seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Continuing on its goal of improving access to pan-European supercomputing infrastracutre, the programme also had the goals of developing programming models for HPC on Massively Parallel Architectures, to aid visiting researchers with the development and parallelization of their applications, and the development of data-grid tools for Scientific Data Services. For the first time in the HPC-Europa programme "virtual visits" were offered as part of HPC-Europa2, in which researchers were able to remotely access the HPC facilities from their institutes. However, the final report on the programme reports low up take on this offer, speculating that this was not what researchers wanted from the HPC-Europa programme. The budget for HPC-Europa2 was 13 million euros, of which 9.5 million euros came from the EU budget.

Current programme: HPC-Europa3

The current HPC-Europa programme, HPC-Europa3, is fully funded under the EU's eighth Framework Programme, better known as

Horizon 2020 The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...

, with a budget of 9.2 million euros. Furthering its original goal of funding visitations of researchers to the 8 supercomputing facilities of the programme partners, HPC-Europa3 identified the

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and the

Western Balkans The Balkans ( ), also known as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the whol ...

as two regions to aid in improving the access of their researchers to European supercomputing infrastructure. The programme has also extended its aims to encouraging

small and medium-sized enterprises Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are businesses whose personnel and revenue numbers fall below certain limits. The abbreviation "SME" is used by international organizations such as the World Ba ...

(SMEs) to use supercomputing infrastructure. The programme also focuses on external co-operation with other European HPC projects, such as PRACE and ETP4HPC. HPC-Europa3 has ten partners: *

Cineca Cineca is a non-profit consortium, made up of 69 Italian universities, 27 national public research centres, the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR) and the Italian Ministry of Education (MI), and was established in 1969 in Casalec ...

, Bologna, Italy *

EPCC EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to ''accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing th ...

, Edinburgh, UK *

BSC A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

, Barcelona, Spain * HLRS, Stuttgart, Germany *

SURFsara SURF is an organization that develops, implements and maintains the national research and education network (NREN) of the Netherlands, It operates the national research network formally called SURFnet. SURF as a network is a backbone computer netw ...

, Amsterdam, the Netherlands * CSC, Helsinki, Finland *

GRNET The Greek Research and Technology Network or GRNET ( el, Εθνικό Δίκτυο Υποδομών Τεχνολογίας και Έρευνας, ΕΔΥΤΕ) is the national research and education network of Greece. GRNET S.A. gives internet co ...

, Athens, Greece * PDC, Stockholm, Sweden * ICHEC, Dublin and Galway, Ireland *

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

, National Centre for Scientific Research, France

Notes

References

External links

* {{official, http://www.hpc-europa.eu/ Information technology organizations based in Europe Research and development in Europe Supercomputing in Europe