Successful Applications for EuroHPC CoEs

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking called for proposals for new centres of excellence (CoEs) earlier this year. After the procurement of three pre-exascale systems, as well as five petascale systems, EuroHPC is planning the acquisition of the first European exascale system as a next step. Significant efforts are needed to prepare applications that will be able to exploit these supercomputers. The new CoEs will be in charge of developing the necessary applications and workflows and organising the respective science and engineering research communities. Their work will start in January 2023 and continue for four years.

One of the successful applicants was the BioExcel CoE for Computational Biomolecular Research, which will enter a new phase, BioExcel-3, that will focus on the area of life sciences. It will support and maintain key European applications for the simulation of classical atomic models on a molecular level up to single cells. This third phase of BioExcel will be coordinated by PDC and involve eight partners from five European countries.

Two other CoEs will focus on the area of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). A new phase of Excellerat (known as Excellerat P2) will work on the enhancement and optimisation of various engineering applications that can be used for addressing different real-life use cases from the mobility and energy sectors. This CoE is coordinated by HLRS, a supercomputing centre in Germany. Altogether fifteen partners from seven countries will work together.

Finally, the completely new CoE for Exascale CFD (CEEC) will be the second CoE coordinated by PDC. CFD is one of the few application areas with use cases that can only be addressed with exascale supercomputers. Applications that have the potential of reaching exascale performance are part of this CoE. Eight universities and research organisations from five countries will work together on making this happen, guided by use cases with high industrial impact.