Kick-off of 10 Centres of Excellence in HPC to support the transition towards exascale

These Centres of Excellence will develop and scale up existing computing codes towards exascale performance. Adapting existing applications to exascale computing capability requires significant changes to already existing applications. In some cases, application codes can no longer run on exascale or post-exascale systems without a complete rethink or a substantial code rewrite. The Centres of Excellence will support this transition in collaboration with HPC users and experts in order to ensure that future exascale EuroHPC systems are accessible to European researchers and industries and address current scientific, industrial and societal challenges.   

The new Centres of Excellence cover a diverse range of applications and use cases, including climate and weather, drug development, astrophysics and cosmology, plasma science and engineering, and will update and develop codes in each area. The most prominent codes, or flagship codes, developed by the Centres of Excellence will be deployed on all EuroHPC supercomputers and will be made available for European scientists and the broader European HPC community. 

The 10 Centres of Excellence selected through the call are the following:  

• Centre of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth (ChEESE-2P) covers earth science with a focus on earthquakes, seismic, tomography, tsunamis, magnetohydrodynamics, physical volcanology, geodynamics, and glacier hazards. Those topics are addressed by artificial intelligence, machine learning, simulation, uncertainty quantification, and neuronal networks. 
• Centre of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research (BioExcel-3) addresses life science, especially biomolecular research, drug development, and molecular dynamics, by using simulation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. 
• HPC and Big Data Technologies for Global Challenges (HiDALGO2) tackles global challenges that affect both the society and environment such as the air quality in urban agglomerations, energy efficiency of buildings, renewable energy sources, the spread of wildfires, and meteo-hydrological forecasting using computational fluid dynamics, high-performance data analytics, and artificial intelligence. 
• Centre of Excellence in Exascale-Oriented Application Co-design and Delivery for Multiscale Simulations (MultiXscale) focuses on software development: performance, productivity, and portability with use cases on helicopter design and certification for civil transport, battery applications for the sustainable energy transition, ultrasound for non-invasive diagnostics, and biomedical applications. 
• Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications (EXCELLERAT P2) contributes to engineering use cases, manufacturing, energy, and mobility, e.g., aircraft, rotors, emissions, aero-dynamics, and aero-acoustics. 
• Centre of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe (ESIWACE3) addresses efficient and scalable simulations for earth system modeling, weather, and climate prediction. 
• Materials Design at the Exascale (MaX) is centered around quantum simulations of materials and therefore contributes to information technology, green energy, health, supporting experimentation at large-scale, and manufacturing. 
• Scalable Parallel and distributed Astrophysical Codes for Exascale (SPACE) focuses on astrophysics and cosmology with the help of numerical simulations. 
• Plasma Exascale-Performance Simulations Centre of Excellence (Plasma-PEPSC) supports plasma science, focusing on magnetic confinement fusion, industrial plasmas, medical applications, basic plasma experiments, plasma accelerators, laser-plasma interactions, high energy density physics/ laboratory astrophysics, space physics, and astrophysics. 
• Center of Excellence for Exascale CFD (CEEC) focuses on engineering, aeronautic, and atmospheric engineering topics such as shock- boundary layer interaction and buffet on wings at the edge of the flight envelope, high fidelity aeroelastic simulation, topology optimization of static mixers, localised erosion of an offshore wind turbine foundation, simulation of atmospheric boundary layer flows, merchant ship hull in model scale. 

More details 

The Centres of Excellences have been selected following the call HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01. This call is funded by Horizon Europe, the EU funding programme for research and innovation with a total budget of up to EUR 90 million including up to EUR 45million of EU contribution to be matched by equivalent national contributions. 

The call for Centres of Excellence was comprised of two topics. Four proposals (MaX, SPACE, Plasma-PEPSC and CEEC) have been selected under the topic Centres of Excellence preparing applications in the Exascale era (HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-01) and six proposals (ChEESE-2P, BioExcel-3, EXCELLERAT P2, ESiWACE3, HiDALGO2 and MultiXscale) have been selected under the topic Centres of Excellence for supporting supercomputing applications for Science and Innovation (HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-02).  

The newly selected EuroHPC Centres of Excellence will build on previous work funded by the European Commission in applications in order to prepare for exascale supercomputing. 

The role of the EuroHPC Centres of Excellence is to gather HPC expertise for a particular sector. Each Centre of Excellence is supported by a number of partners ranging from universities to supercomputing centres to industrial partners who collaborate to combine their skills and expertise.  

From 2023, they will receive support from the EuroHPC project Castiel2, which coordinates strategic collaboration and communication between the Centres of Excellence. 

The selected projects started on 1 January 2023 and are due to run for a period of four years. 

More information regarding current and upcoming EuroHPC calls can be found here. 

Background 

The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity, created in 2018 and reviewed in 2021 by means of Council Regulation (EU) 2021/1173, with the mission to: 

• develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the EU a world-leading federated, secure and hyper-connected supercomputing, quantum computing, service and data infrastructure ecosystem; 

• support the development and uptake of demand-oriented and user-driven innovative and competitive supercomputing system based on a supply chain that will ensure components, technologies and knowledge limiting the risk of disruptions and the development of a wide range of applications optimised for these systems; 

• widen the use of that supercomputing infrastructure to a large number of public and private users and support the development of key HPC skills for European science and industry. 

In order to equip Europe with a world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC JU has already procured eight supercomputers, located across Europe. Six supercomputers are now operational:  LUMI in Finland, LEONARDO in Italy, Vega in Slovenia, MeluXina in Luxembourg, Discoverer in Bulgaria and Karolina in the Czech Republic. Two more supercomputers are also underway:  MareNostrum5 in Spain and Deucalion in Portugal.