Centres of Excellence in exascale computing

Topic description

Specific Challenge:

Supporting Centres of Excellence (CoE) that advance and promote the use of upcoming exascale computing capabilities in areas where user communities in collaboration with other High Performance Computer (HPC) stakeholders can develop or scale up existing parallel codes towards exascale performance, resulting into tangible benefits for scientific, industrial or societal challenges.

CoEs must be user-driven and inherently committed to co-design activities to ensure that future HPC architectures are well suited for the applications and their users (both from academia and industry), providing with a high performance and scalable application base. CoEs will federate existing resources around Europe, exploiting available competences, and ensuring multidisciplinarity (combining application domain and HPC system, software and algorithm expertise) and synergies with national/regional programmes. CoEs must further enlarge and expand these capabilities all over in Europe, in particular by including users communities from EU countries currently developing and advancing their HPC infrastructure and ecosystem (e.g. countries not currently hosting Tier 0 and/or Tier 1 supercomputing facilities).

This topic builds and complements the INFRAEDI-02-2018 HPC PPP - Centres of Excellence on HPC applications call.

Proposals should clearly identify the target area/domain that will be the focus of their work, which must have great potential to achieve exascale performance in Europe, (e.g. Materials Science, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Personalised Medicine, etc.). Proposals must convincingly demonstrate this potential and the need for exascale requirements. Proposals must also develop synergies with existing CoEs and show European added value. Should the proposed work target an area or domain already covered by existing CoEs, proposals must clearly elaborate on how their proposal further expands and develops progress beyond what existing CoEs are implementing (e.g. different/new codes upgraded, new user communities, etc.) and demonstrate that they shall cooperate with existing CoEs (if relevant) and avoid any kind of overlaps/duplication in the selected area of work.

Proposals must address:

• Research in HPC applications towards highly scalable, optimised codes and the path to exascale performance (both computing and extreme data)
• The provision of services supporting different usage models for the community needs, and contributing to the potential convergence of HPC, High Throughput Computing (HTC), and HPDA (High-Performance Data Analytics). This includes developing, maintaining, optimising (if needed re-designing) and scaling HPC application codes, addressing the full scientific/industrial workflow, particularly covering data aspects; testing and validating codes and quality assurance
• Commitment to the co-design approach (hardware, software, codes), including the identification of suitable applications relevant to the development of European HPC technologies towards exascale
• Enlarging and expanding HPC applications development and use, in particular for new users communities in EU countries currently developing and advancing their HPC infrastructure and ecosystem
• Ensure wider access to codes and foster their uptake by user communities, in particular industry and SMEs
• In collaboration with the support action foreseen in the INFRAEDI-02-2018 HPC PPP - Centres of Excellence on HPC call, address the skills gap in computational science in the targeted domain by specialised training and capacity building measures to develop the human capital resources for increased adoption of advanced HPC in industry and academia

Proposals must include clear KPIs allowing the assessment of the progress towards the objectives, both in terms of outputs and ultimate impact.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of up to EUR 5 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a duration from 24 to 36 months would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately.

• European leadership in exascale-oriented codes and innovative algorithms/solutions that address societal challenges or are important for key scientific and industrial applications;
• Improved access to computing applications and expertise that enables researchers and industry to be more productive, leading to scientific excellence and economic and social benefit;
• Increased access to and uptake of applications by relevant user communities in those countries currently developing and advancing their HPC infrastructure and ecosystem;
• Improved competitiveness for European companies and SMEs;
• Federating capabilities and integrating communities around computational science in Europe;
• Complementarity and synergy with existing Centres of Excellence on HPC applications;
• A large number of female and male scientists and engineers trained in the use of computational methods and optimisation of applications.

Gender
Clean Energy
Open Innovation
Open Science