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. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
According to the TOP500 list of November 2024, Italy's HPC6 is the fastest European supercomputer.
In June 2011, France's Tera 100 was certified the fastest supercomputer in Europe, and ranked 9th in the world at the time. It was the first petascale supercomputer designed and built in Europe.
There are several efforts to coordinate European leadership in high-performance computing. The ETP4HPC Strategic Research Agenda outlines a technology roadmap for exascale in Europe, with a key motivation being an increase in the global market share of the HPC technology developed in Europe. 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.
Pan-European HPC organisation
There have been several projects to organise supercomputing applications within Europe. The first was the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications. This ran from 2002 to 2011. The organisation of supercomputing has been taken over by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe.From 2018 to 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.
In addition to advances being shared with the HPC research community such as the "Putting the Ocean into the Center" visualization and progress on the "Digital Twin" that is already being used to run in silico clinical trials, 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. Additionally, EU Centres of Excellence are providing support throughout the COVID-19 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.
High performance computing tiers
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". PRACE categorises European HPC facilities into 3 tiers: Tier-0 are European Centres with petaflop machines, Tier-1 are national centres, and Tier-2 are regional centres.PRACE has 8 Tier-0 systems:
- JUWELS Booster
- JUWELS Cluster
- SuperMUC-NG
- HAWK
- Marconi100
- Piz Daint
- MareNostrum 4
- Joliot Curie. Note that PRACE lists Joliot Curie KNL, Rome, and SKL separately but counts them as one system
By country
Austria
The Vienna Scientific Cluster is a collaboration between several Austrian universities. 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 VSC-4 cluster was ranked 82nd in the Top-500 list in June 2019. VSC-4 was installed in summer 2019 at the Arsenal TU building in Vienna.Belgium
On 25 October 2012, Ghent University inaugurated the first Tier 1 supercomputer of the Flemish Supercomputer Centre. The supercomputer is part of an initiative by the Flemish government to provide the researchers in Flanders with a very powerful computing infrastructure. The new cluster was ranked 163rd in the worldwide Top500 list of supercomputers in November 2012.In 2014, a supercomputer started operating at Cenaero in Gosselies.
In 2016, VSC started operating the BrENIAC supercomputer in Leuven. It has 16,128 cores providing 548,000 Gflops or 619,315 Gflops.
Bulgaria
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Sofia operates an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which offers high-performance processing to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University, among other organizations. The system was on the TOP500 list until November 2009, when it ranked as number 379.A second supercomputer, the "Discoverer", was installed in 2020 and ranked 91st in the TOP500 in 2021. "Discoverer", Bulgaria's supercomputer was the third launched under the program on 21 October 2021. Located on the territory of the Bulgarian Science and Technology Park "Sofia Tech Park" in Sofia, Bulgaria. The cost is co-financed by Bulgaria and EuroHPC JU with a joint investment of €11.5 million completed by Atos. Discoverer has a stable performance of 4.5 petaflops and a peak performance of 6 petaflops.
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.
Croatia
The Center for Advanced Computing and Modelling in Rijeka was established in 2010 and conducts multidisciplinary scientific research through the use of advanced high-performance solutions based on CPU and GPGPU server technologies and technologies for data storage. 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.Finland
operated a Cray XC30 system called "Sisu" with 244 TFlop/s. In September 2014 the system was upgraded to Cray XC40, giving a theoretical peak of 1,688 TFLOPS. Sisu was ranked 37th in the November 2014 Top500 list, but had dropped to 107th by November 2017. 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 while awaiting JUPITER's construction as part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking.France
The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives operates the Tera 100 machine in the Research and Technology Computing Center in Essonne, Île-de-France. The Tera 100 has a peak processing speed of 1,050 teraflops, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe in 2011. Built by Groupe Bull, it had 140,000 processors.The National Computer Center of Higher Education was established in Montpellier in 1999, and offers computer services for research and higher education. In 2014 the Occigen system was installed, which was manufactured by the Bull, Atos Group. It has 50,544 cores and a peak performance of 2.1 Petaflops.
Germany
In Germany, supercomputing is organized at two levels. The three national centers at Garching, Juelich and Stuttgart together form the Gauss Center for Supercomputing, and provide both the European Tier 0 level of HPC and the German national Tier 1 level. A number of medium-sized centers are also organized in the Gauss Alliance.The Jülich Supercomputing Centre and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing jointly owned the JUGENE computer at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in North Rhine-Westphalia. JUGENE was based on IBM's Blue Gene/P architecture, and in June 2011 was ranked the 12th fastest computer in the world by TOP500. It was replaced by the Blue Gene/Q system JUQUEEN on 31 July 2012.
The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, a supercomputing center in Munich, houses the SuperMUC system, which began operations in 2012 at a processing speed of 3 petaflops. This was, at the time it entered service, the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The High Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart fastest computing system is Hawk with a peak performance of 26 petaflops, replacing Hazel Hen with a peak performance of more than 7.4 petaflops. Hazel Hen, which is based on Cray XC40 technology, was ranked the 8th fastest system worldwide.