Four years ago, four leading European supercomputing centres decided on the formation of a world-class consortium to execute a joint Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) for the first time in the area of high-performance computing (HPC). With a total investment of € 73 million, co-funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission (EC), the PPI4HPC project is now wrapping up its activities after achieving a significant enhancement of the planned pre-exascale HPC infrastructure and paving the path for future joint investments in Europe.
In order to address major scientific, industrial and societal challenges, and to maintain Europe competitiveness within a global race, the EC has implemented a vision towards the establishment of a strong and competitive HPC integrated ecosystem in Europe. Within this framework, the partners in PPI4HPC worked together on coordinated roadmaps for providing HPC resources optimised to the needs of European scientists and engineers. This was organised via a joint PPI4HPC procurement, with four independent lots leading to the awarding of contracts for systems deployed at four different European research sites. These systems include innovative high-performance supercomputers and a storage system for science and engineering applications.
The involved HPC centres, BSC, CEA/GENCI, CINECA and Jülich Supercomputing Centre, have had a strong track record in providing supercomputing resources at European level and they are all hosting centres of the PRACE e-infrastructure. The participants worked together to align their respective roadmaps and identify common needs when serving European scientists and engineers.
This joint initiative created benefits in multiple respects:
• More supercomputing resources and optimised innovative solutions are efficiently exploitable for science and engineering applications in Europe.
• Demonstration of the capability of multiple leading European HPC centres to successfully execute a joint procurement.
• R&D on HPC architectures and technologies in Europe are strengthened as suitable incentives were provided by this joint procurement process.
Discover the main features of PPI4HPC and the individual procured systems on our PPI4HPC in a nutshell page.
Browse through our Success Stories to learn about how various projects have benefited from the use of the innovative systems installed at the different sites.
