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 (DEISA), 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. 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. Switzerland's Piz Daint is the fastest European supercomputer, following an upgrade in October 2016 it is ranked 3rd in the world with a peak of over 25 petaflops. There are several efforts to coordinate European leadership in high-performance computing. The ETP4HPC Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) 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. On 25 October 2012, Ghent University (Belgium) inaugurated the first Tier 1 supercomputer of the Flemish Supercomputer Centre (VSC). 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 (NEC HPC1816Rg, Xeon E5-2680v4 14C 2.4GHz, Infiniband EDR) in Leuven. It has 16,128 cores providing 548,000 Gflops (Rmax) or 619,315 Gflops (Repack). 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. This system is one of the few supercomputers in Eastern Europe, and the only one in the Balkans. The system was on the TOP500 list until November 2009, when it ranked as number 379. The Center for Advanced Computing and Modelling (CNRM) 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. CSC – IT Center for Science 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.