In September, the EuroCC project was launched with KIFU on board

Under the aegis of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the EuroCC and CASTIEL (Coordination and Support for National Competence Centres on a European Level) projects were launched with a view to establishing a complex European network of 33 HPC national competence centres. The objective of this project is to make supercomputers widely known throughout Europe and to popularise international cooperation and good practices in every part of Europe.

The tasks of the 33 competence centres constituting the EuroCC network include exploring fields of applications and establishing a good reputation for supercomputers. These competence centres coordinate supercomputer-related skills on a national level and facilitate access to European capacities by researchers, the scientific community, public administration, and certain industrial sectors – thereby offering custom solutions to a wide range of users. Hungary is represented by KIFU’s HPC Competence Centre in this project.

The CASTIEL project promotes communication and knowledge transfer between the national HPC competence centres within the entire HPC network. The project includes the preparation of a map of European HPC competencies, which will show both the available resources and the fields of application. This development is expected to result in an increasingly closer international cooperation, which ensures the sharing of experience and skills in order to eliminate previously identified weaknesses. CASTIEL is responsible for organising international workshops, mentoring/twinning partnerships, and thematic work groups, which are designed to eliminate common problems.
The objective of these projects is to coordinate high-level expertise throughout Europe in the field of HPC and related sciences, such as high-performance data analysis (HPDA) and artificial intelligence. Such European knowledge and expertise are of vital importance in order to strengthen the technological autonomy and competitiveness of the European Union.

On 1 September 2020, the EuroCC project was launched for a two-year period with a total budget of EUR 57 million. Half of the costs are covered by the Horizon 2000 program, and the other half by the 33 participant countries. The CASTIEL project is also a two-year program which started on 1 September 2020 with a budget of an additional EUR 2 million from the Horizon 2000 program.
These projects are coordinated by the Stuttgart-based HLRS, a member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).