On 9 June 2010 the European Commission welcomed the official launch in Barcelona of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) project, a €500 million initiative to boost European supercomputer capacities and to open these up to scientists across Europe.

PRACE will enable European researchers to use super fast computers located in other European countries. This represents a combined computing power equivalent to more than 100 000 of today's fastest PCs and it will speed calculation time tremendously, to up to 1 000 trillion calculations per second.

In practice this means that research can be conducted incomparably faster, at massive scale and far more accurately. It also means that problems that could not be solved so far - because they were too large and complex - can now be addressed. This new way of doing science will be available to scientists from all over Europe on the basis of the scientific merit of the research to be carried out. Scientists will be able to fully use the infrastructure from 1 August 2010, after their application has been approved by a common European Peer Review process.

As a result, PRACE helps to expand scientific knowledge which in turn delivers social and economic benefits; this is well in line with the objectives of the Digital Agenda for Europe, one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

The first machine to be made available to European scientists under the initiative is Europe's fastest computer, the JUGENE system located in Jülich, Germany. More supercomputers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain will be added between 2011 and by 2015. PRACE remains open to other countries which can host such supercomputers.

PRACE unites the European Commission and 20 European countries. In Barcelona the major contributors - France, Germany, Italy and Spain - signed the statutes of the PRACE organisation; an international non-profit association, it will bring together the supercomputers to form the single infrastructure.

France, Germany, Italy and Spain have each committed to invest €100 million in the initiative over the next 5 years. The European Commission is contributing €70 million through the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7). Sixteen other countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and UK) are also taking part with smaller contributions of resources and expertise.

Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said: "I warmly welcome the launch of the PRACE supercomputer infrastructure as scientific computing is a key driver for the development of modern science and technology and for addressing the major challenges of our time like climate change, energy saving and the ageing population." 

 

Further information: 

• Original press release - RAPID
• PRACE Project
• About JUGENE
• Digital Agenda for Europe
• 7th Research Framework Programme