Concerted action for the European HPC CoEs

High Performance Computing (HPC) has been recognised by the European Union as a key component of the digital single market strategy. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is being created to support an integrated European HPC ecosystem covering all scientific and industrial value chain segments (hardware, software, applications, services, interconnections, and skills). HPC applications have a pivotal role in the HPC ecosystem: borrowing a promotional slogan used previously by the IEEE SC (supercomputing) conference – HPC Matters, primarily because the use of HPC (to address industrial, scientific and societal challenges) matters! As has been presented by the European Commission and the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC) when establishing the contractual public private partnership (cPPP) for HPC, the European HPC Centres of Excellence (CoEs) constitute the applications-oriented pillar of the European HPC Initiative (complementing infrastructure and computing technology development). FocusCoE will contribute to the success of the EU HPC Ecosystem and the EuroHPC Initiative by supporting the EU HPC CoEs to more effectively fulfil their role within the ecosystem and initiative: ensuring that extreme scale applications result in tangible benefits for addressing scientific, industrial or societal challenges. It will do this by creating an effective platform for the CoEs to coordinate strategic directions and collaboration (addressing possible fragmentation of activities across the CoEs and coordinating interactions with the overall HPC ecosystem) and will provide support services for the CoEs in relation to both industrial outreach and promotion of their services and competences by acting as a focal point for users to discover those services.