The EUPEX pilot project brings together academic and commercial stakeholders to co-design a European modular exascale computer.
EUPEX’s ambition is to actively support the European industrial ecosystem around high-performance computing (HPC), as well as to prepare applications and users to efficiently exploit future European exascale computers.
The project will achieve this through a pilot hardware and software platform integrating the full spectrum of European technologies. It will demonstrate the readiness and scalability of these technologies, and particularly of the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA), towards exascale.
Europe’s push to be a leader in exascale computing
The European Union is striving to regain its digital sovereignty, turning from a simple user of computer technologies into a self-reliant player capable of designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing all the necessary technological bricks.
It is an essential asset to master exascale computing technologies, an asset which will filter through the entire computing continuum.
Therefore, the EUPEX consortium brings together 17 European organisations in a balanced alliance between established European technology suppliers and vendors, recognised research organisations and universities, European-scale computing centres, and application owners.
This mix of public and private sector stakeholders guarantees that the innovative research conducted by the consortium will quickly translate into European-grown industrialised solutions that will reduce Europe’s dependence on foreign supercomputing technologies.
Integrating European technologies
EUPEX leverages the best assets developed in previous H2020 projects to design, build, and validate the first HPC platform, encompassing architecture, processors, interconnects, and system software.
The EUPEX pilot system is:
- Modular: The OpenSequana-compliant hardware platform and the matching HPC software ecosystem implement the Modular Supercomputing Architecture to integrate and manage efficiently a variety of hardware modules.
- Large: The size of the pilot exascale computer is large enough to be a proof of concept for a modular architecture relying on European technologies, in particular the European processor technology (EPI).
- Production-grade: This is due to technical choices guided by the maturity of the European solutions available.
EUPEX applications
The EUPEX exascale computing pilot system will advance new innovations and discoveries in critical areas, such as:
- Climate and weather
- Precision agriculture
- Biology and health
- Remote sensing
- Materials science
- Astrophysics
- Engineering
- Seismology
