Where’s Europe in the exascale race?
Summary
Over the past few years, we have witnessed an unprecedented shift in the adoption of digital technologies, from High Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data analytics to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Once available only to educational institutions and major corporations, HPC has become more attainable today as public clouds and community datacentres are enabling smaller organisations to book remote computational capacity on demand, paying only for the core-hours and related services. HPC can enable commercial organisations to solve a wide spectrum of complex problems, including product optimisation and electronic design, credit analysis and fraud detection, drug discovery and human studies, oil and gas exploration, climate research and weather prediction, rendering and movie pre- and post-production, the list is almost endless! The continent’s supercomputing efforts have also been bolstered by Horizon Europe, a seven-year European Union scientific research framework that is investing nearly €80 billion to fuel discoveries and world-firsts, including the development of EU-based exascale machines. This machine - an HPE Apollo 9000 system with 5,632 nodes spread across its 44 cabinets - delivers around 26 peak petaflops of performance and has enabled educational institutions and customers to carry out cutting edge academic and industrial research in a wide range of contexts.