High-Performance Computing, as a key tool for science and industry, has steadily grown over the past three decades into a mature technology that supports many of Europe’s most important sectors. In many parts of the European economy, including engineering, health, climate and energy, usage of computer aided design coupled to modelling and simulation continues to grow rapidly. The software applications used in these sectors drive innovation. In many areas from academia, industry but also public administration, the use of iterative modelling and simulation - including data management, analysis and visualisation - is becoming more and more important. HPC alone or HPC in combination with HPDA and AI provide the means to tackle not only large, complex problems but also to widen further the use and uptake of these technologies in academia, public administration and industry. Thus a symbiotic cooperation needs to be established, where the stakeholders of HPC infrastructures, services and expertise are enabled to improve their service portfolio on base of the customers’ needs and thus to help the end users with a maximum of efficiency in their respective domain.
The mission of the EuroCC project is to implement the network of National Competence Centres (NCC) in the most efficient way. There is obviously a diversity in maturity of HPC provisioning of Europe. Whilst some centres have already a long history in dealing with a variety of customers, especially also from industry, others still need to establish these service to nationally have impact in that field. Thus, the major task of the overall activity, besides the high level management to monitor the progress of the evolution of the NCCs, is to help the national centres to set up their individual operation frames and at the same time to get access to and make best use of the currently available experiences and expertise on a national and on a European level. For the latter, there will be a close co-operation with the Coordination and Support Action as to be funded under EuroHPC-04.2019 b). A core team of the proposers of EuroCC will also hand in the aligned CSA (Name: CASTIEL), which is tailored to support the needs of EuroCC on collaboration and exchanges of best practices and knowledge on a European level.
The main objective of EuroCC is to implement a European support structure based on strongly interconnected National Competence Centres (NCCs) to enable and support academia, public administration and industry (especially SMEs) to benefit from the advantages of available HPC expertise, experience and resources in Europe. There is a clear demand that this is realized by only one single point of contact and coordination in each European country (the National Competence Centre) to implement and coordinate all necessary activities on a national level. This includes:
