A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS. Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in China, the United States, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan to build even faster, more powerful and more technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
The Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund are financial tools set up to implement the regional policy of the European Union. They aim to reduce regional disparities in income, wealth and opportunities. Europe's poorer regions receive most of the support, but all European regions are eligible for funding under the policy's various funds and programmes. The current Regional Policy framework is set for a period of seven years, from 2014 to 2020.
The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific Council, its governing body consisting of distinguished researchers, and an Executive Agency, in charge of the implementation. It forms part of the framework programme of the union dedicated to research and innovation, Horizon 2020, preceded by the Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7). The ERC budget is over €13 billion from 2014 – 2020 and comes from the Horizon 2020 programme, a part of the European Union's budget. Under Horizon 2020 it is estimated that around 7,000 ERC grantees will be funded and 42,000 team members supported, including 11,000 doctoral students and almost 16,000 post-doctoral researchers.
The European Research Area (ERA) is a system of scientific research programs integrating the scientific resources of the European Union (EU). Since its inception in 2000, the structure has been concentrated on European cooperation in the fields of medical, environmental, industrial, and socioeconomic research. The ERA can be likened to a research and innovation equivalent of the European "common market" for goods and services. Its purpose is to increase the competitiveness of European research institutions by bringing them together and encouraging a more inclusive way of work, similar to what already exists among institutions in North America and Japan. Increased mobility of knowledge workers and deepened multilateral cooperation among research institutions among the member states of the European Union are central goals of the ERA.
The European Union has a budget to finance policies carried out at European level.
The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP7 with "FP8" being named "Horizon 2020", are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the European Research Area (ERA). The specific objectives and actions vary between funding periods. In FP6 and FP7 focus was still in technological research, in Horizon 2020 the focus is in innovation, delivering economic growth faster and delivering solutions to end users that are often governmental agencies.
European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international research in many scientific disciplines. Following a series of research projects such as DataGrid and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, the EGI Foundation was formed in 2010 to sustain the services of EGI.
Interreg is a series of programmes to stimulate cooperation between regions in the European Union, funded by the European Regional Development Fund. The first Interreg started in 1989. Interreg IV covered the period 2007–2013. Interreg V (2014-2020) covers all 28 EU Member States, 3 participating EFTA countries, 6 accession countries and 18 neighbouring countries. It has a budget of EUR 10.1 billion, which represents 2.8% of the total of the European Cohesion Policy budget. Since the non EU countries don't pay EU membership fee, they contribute directly to Interreg, not through ERDF.
CORDIS is the Community Research and Development Information Service. It is the European Commission's primary public repository and portal to disseminate information on all EU-funded research projects and their results in the broadest sense.
Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) is a program funded by the European Union to do research on the Internet, its prospects, and its future, a field known as "future Internet".
The United States Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) was initiated in 1992 in response to Congressional direction to modernize the Department of Defense (DoD) laboratories’ high performance computing capabilities. The HPCMP provides supercomputers, a national research network, and computational science experts that together enable the Defense laboratories and test centers to conduct research, development, test and technology evaluation activities.
The Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) of the European Commission is meant to improve the competitiveness of European companies facing the challenges of globalization. The programme is mainly aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which will receive support for innovation activities, better access to finance and business support services. It will run from 2007 to 2013.
The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a European Union supercomputer project. A consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on European high-performance computing systems. By extending the European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing, DEISA followed suggestions of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion (i.e. a quintillion) calculations per second. Such capacity represents a thousandfold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008. (One exaflop is a thousand petaflops or a quintillion, 1018, floating point operations per second.) At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018. This proved accurate, as Oak Ridge National Laboratory performed a 1.8×1018 flop calculation on the Summit OLCF-4 Supercomputer while analyzing genomic information in 2018. They were Gordon Bell Finalists at Supercomputing 2018.
High Performance Computing Wales was a £44million five-year project (2010–2015) to provide Wales with a world class facility in High Performance Computing, accessible to both academic and commercial organisations based in Wales. The project aimed to give Wales a supercomputing capacity and network at a scale not attempted anywhere else in the UK or Europe. It is being followed by another five-year, £15million programme of investment called Supercomputing Wales.
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.
Many universities, vendors, institutes and government organizations are investing in cloud computing research:
XLAB d.o.o. is a software development company, founded in 2001 and based in Slovenia. XLAB focuses on cloud computing technologies, HPC, data analytics, IoT and cyber security. Its research department has participated in several European ICT research projects, most notably in XtreemOS, SLA@SOI and Contrail.
The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnership in High Performance Computing (HPC), enabling the pooling of European Union (EU) -level resources with the resources of participating EU Member States and particpating associated states of the Horizon 2020 programme, as well as private stakeholders. The Joint Undetaking has the twin stated aims of developing a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, and supporting research and innovation activities. Located in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, the Joint Undertaking started operating in November 2018 and will remain operational until the end of 2026.