EuroCC seeks to elevate European advanced computing presented a new cycle for the next three years.
The city of Stuttgart, Germany, hosted the official launch of the second cycle of the EuroCC program - EuroCC 2. For three days, at the beginning of 2023, representatives of the 34 countries involved were gathered to learn about and discuss in detail the plan for the next three years.
On its website, EuroHPC JU defines the role of EuroCC 2 as "to establish and foster a network of more than 30 national competence centers in the various participating countries". In this sense, these competence centers will act as "single access points in each country", in order to facilitate the articulation between the various agents and the advanced computing resources, at regional and national level.
In this way, they add, it will be possible to strengthen links with local communities and businesses, mapping skills in this area and ensuring access to supercomputing resources for private and public sector users. The total budget for these three years of activity is 62 million euros, under the Digital Europe Program.
For this reason, this new cycle of the program includes training activities, industry liaison, skill mapping and communication actions, in order to promote the adoption of high-performance computing services in related fields such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence or data analysis, to "expand the HPC user base."
What is the EuroCC?
EuroCC's mission is to take Europe to the highest level of advanced computing (High Performance Computing - HPC) or supercomputing. Co-funded by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the initiative is a European HPC competence network that promotes cooperation and implementation of best practices in this area across Europe.
The overall goal of EuroCC is thus to implement a European support structure, based on National Competence Centers (NCCs), strongly linked to support academia, research, public administration and industry (with a special focus on small and medium-sized enterprises), in order to take advantage of the expertise, experience and HPC resources available in the geographical area of Europe.
Since 2020, the Portuguese EuroCC competence center has been coordinated by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through its Unit FCCN, and integrates several partner entities that, through this project, provide experience and capacities to support the adoption and use of HPC, thus fulfilling the global purpose of EuroCC.
