On 25 June, the Council of the EU adopted a legislative proposal to develop a European supercomputer infrastructure. The joint undertaking known as EuroHPC is expected to commence at the beginning of 2019 at the latest.
High-performance computing is expected to facilitate the processing of a high number of data from supercomputers in record time. In 2012, the EU had 4 out of 10 of the highest performing machines in the world but now only has one of them.
The regulation introduces a legal, contractual and organisational framework to tackle this trend. It launches a public-private partnership to which EU member states, third countries involved in the Horizon 2020 programme and private organisations will be invited to participate. New members will be able to sign up to this joint undertaking, which will be based in Luxembourg until the end of 2026. The regulation proposes to earmark €486 million from the EU budget: €386 million will come from the "Horizon 2020" research programme and €100 million from the Connecting Europe Facility.
In relation to the proposal presented in January, member states have amended the provisions on the voting system (which member can vote on which decision?) and the use of structural funds for acquiring supercomputers.
The Commission is hoping that the EU will acquire pre-exascale performance systems (1017 or 100 million billion calculations per second) by 2019-2020 and exascale performance systems (1018 or 1 billion billion calculations per second) by 2022-2023. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)