PRACE & EuroHPC JU Join Forces to Enable Excellent Research on HPC

The PRACE research infrastructure prace-ri.eu  was established in 2010 as a collaborative effort which included most European countries. Since then, PRACE has developed and established itself as a successful research infrastructure. It offers world-class high-performance computing (HPC) resources and services through an established peer review process (solely based on scientific excellence), with a strong training and support programme which is highly respected by the European user communities and valued by stakeholders and policymakers. The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU, eurohpc-ju.europa.eu ) is a legal and funding entity, created in 2018 and located in Luxembourg. The EuroHPC JU enables the European Union and the countries participating in the EuroHPC JU to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources to make Europe a world leader in supercomputing.

Since June 2019, high-level coordination meetings involving members of PRACE (the council chair, vice-chair, managing director, and council delegate) and EuroHPC (the governing board chair, vice-chair, and executive director) have been held to align activities, and discuss and define roles in the European HPC ecosystem. A joint working group on access policies was established with experts from PRACE, EuroHPC and the Infrastructure Advisory Group (INFRAG). The objective of the working group was to prepare an access policy document for the EuroHPC Governing Board eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2021-03/Decision 06.2021 - Access policy. pdf .

In 2021, the EuroHPC JU delegated part of the implementation of the access policy to PRACE. For this, the EuroHPC JU relied on the structure established by PRACE (which includes the necessary committees, expert databases and IT tools) to implement the evaluation and application process. PRACE implemented these processes under the guidance of the EuroHPC JU Executive Director. The task of coordinating the different actors involved in the access and evaluation procedures was performed by the PRACE Access Resource Committee, which assumed the role of the EuroHPC JU Access Resource Committee, with the JU Executive Director joining the PRACE committee for this task. The task of determining the final allocation of resources was not delegated to PRACE and is being undertaken by the JU’s Resource Allocation Panel. The portal for European HPC services is still under development, however, it already serves as a one-stop shop for exploring HPC access, training and other offerings – see hpc-portal.eu .