According to the commission, supercomputers are at the core of major innovations in many areas such as personalised medicine, energy saving and smart urban planning. They also hold great potential for job creation and the competitiveness of the European economy.

“Currently, the computing and data needs of European scientists and industry are not matching the computation time available in the EU. Moreover, the EU does not have the most powerful machines that some of their applications require. Therefore, the European HPC users are increasingly processing their data outside the EU,” the commission said in a statement on its website, adding that the outsourcing may create problems related to privacy, data protection, commercial trade secrets and ownership of data.

None of the EU supercomputers being in the global top 10 and the existing ones depending on non-European technology means the EU risks being deprived of strategic or technological know-how for innovation and competitiveness.

The joint undertaking aims at pooling European and national resources to build and deploy across Europe supercomputers that will rank among the world’s top three by 2022-2023. The declaration was originally launched in March 2017 and signed by France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Since then another eight countries have joined in addition to Cyprus – Belgium, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece, Croatia and the Czech Republic.

Source: Cyprus Mail