EuroCC seeks to elevate European advanced computing has 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 in early 2023, representatives from the 34 countries involved met to learn about and discuss in detail the plan for the next three years.
On its website, the EuroHPC JU defines the role of EuroCC 2 as "establishing and dynamizing 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," facilitating coordination between the various stakeholders and advanced computing resources at the regional and national levels.
This will strengthen ties with local communities and businesses, mapping out competencies in this area, and ensuring access to supercomputing resources for users in the private and public sectors. The total budget for these three years of activity is 62 million euros. scope of the Digital Europe Programme.
For this reason, this new cycle of the program includes training activities, industry outreach, skills mapping, and communication initiatives, aiming to promote the adoption of high-performance computing services in related fields such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and data analytics, to "expand the HPC user base."
What is EuroCC?
EuroCC's mission is to elevate 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 constitutes a European HPC competence network that promotes cooperation and the implementation of best practices in this area across Europe.
The overall objective of EuroCC is 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), so that they can benefit from the advantages of HPC expertise, experience and resources available in the European geographical area.
Since 2020, the Portuguese competence center EuroCC has been coordinated by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through its FCCN Unit, and includes several partner entities that, through this project, provide experience and capabilities in supporting the adoption and use of HPC, thus fulfilling the global purpose of EuroCC.
