EU invests almost €7 million in European world-class supercomputing in Portugal

Today the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, which pools European resources to buy and deploy world-class supercomputers and technologies, announced the signature for a contract worth €20 million for a new supercomputing system: Deucalion  in Portugal.  The EU will contribute nearly €7 million to the cost of the supercomputer, which will be capable of up to 10 petaflops or 10 million billion calculations per second, and will be hosted by the Minho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC). It will be used to further advance research and development in resource and energy efficient technologies, drug discovery, and weather prediction. It will also help develop industrial applications in many domains: drug and material design, bio-engineering, and climate-friendly energy systems. The EU is at the forefront of investment in next-generation supercomputing infrastructure. In addition to the Deucalion in Portugal, 6 EuroHPC supercomputers have been acquired in the following centres: Sofiatech in Bulgaria, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in Czechia, CINECA in Italy,  LuxProvide in Luxembourg, IZUM in Slovenia, and CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland. The Joint Undertaking plans to acquire another pre-exascale supercomputer in Spain, later this year. Moreover, a Commission proposal, presented in September 2020, aims to enable a further investment of €8 billion in the next generation of supercomputers and quantum technologies. More information is available here.