On 20 April 2021, the European Joint Undertaking for High Performance Computing (EuroHPC), the European Commission and the Slovenian government inaugurated the Vega supercomputer in Maribor, Slovenia. Vega was supplied by Atos and will be hosted by the Slovenian Institute of Information Sciences (IZUM). The supercomputer is the first in Europe to be acquired with funds from the European Union and its member states, an investment of 17.2 million euros.

The inauguration of a high-performance supercomputer

This new supercomputer will support the development of applications in many fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and high-performance data analysis. It has a computing capacity equivalent to 6.9 petaflops and will be able to help European industry and researchers in the various Member States to make significant advances in bioengineering in the future

Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President for a Digital Europe, commented on the launch of Vega and the possibilities it will bring in the long term:

“Today we celebrate the launch of the Vega supercomputer, the first of many. High performance computing will enable European SMEs to compete in the high-tech economy of tomorrow. Most importantly, by helping artificial intelligence to identify molecules for breakthrough drugs and by enabling the monitoring of diseases such as COVID, European HPC can help save lives.”

In March this year, IZUM Director Dr Aleš Bošnjak commented on the arrival of Vega at his institute:

“With the start-up of Vega, the largest supercomputer in Slovenia, we have, as part of the HPC RIVR operation (ed. note: a Slovenian supercomputer) and with substantial own investment, acquired the largest research infrastructure in Slovenia. The Vega supercomputer will soon enable Slovenian and European researchers to cooperate in major international research projects and also accelerate the use of HPC capacities in Slovenia.”

A first that calls for more

Since 2017, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has been pooling European and national resources for the acquisition and deployment of supercomputers and high-performance technologies. EuroHPC wants to deploy supercomputers in other European countries: apart from Vega at IZUM in Slovenia, other centres are ready to host them. The Sofia Tech Park in Bulgaria, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in the Czech Republic, CINECA in Italy, LuxProvide in Luxembourg, the Minho Advanced Computing Center in Portugal and the Computer Science Centre in Finland are the centres targeted by EuroHPC.

In addition, a proposal for a new regulation on the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking was presented by the Commission in September 2020. 8 billion would be made available to develop the next generation of supercomputers, including technologies such as quantum computers.

Translated from EuroHPC inaugure Vega, le premier supercalculateur commun aux états membres de l’Union Européenne