Latvia joins declaration on cooperation in high-performance computing

Latvia joined the Declaration on Cooperation in High-performance Computing (HPC) to promote development of high-performance computing technologies, scientific excellence and an innovative and competitive industry in Europe, as well as to provide scientists and research organisations access to the supercomputer infrastructure. In January 2018, the European Commission proposed a Europe-wide cooperation in supercomputer area — EuroHPC.

By signing the declaration, the countries agree to create a cooperation framework in HPC with the aim of establishing and developing an interconnected HPC infrastructure (network) that is available to European scientists and research organisations, merchants and individuals irrespective of the actual location of the infrastructure objects. An appropriate procurement procedure will be developed to ensure that two world-level pre-exascale supercomputers are built in 2019–2020 and two supercomputers of full exascale are created in 2022–2023. The procurement will also include experimental and demo HPC models, and access to big data will be provided to scientific, public administration and industrial organisations.

By signing the declaration, Latvia has gained the possibility to be among the founders of EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

On 23 March 2017 at the Digital Day in Rome, declaration on cooperation in high-performance computing was signed by the first seven EU Member States: France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. They agreed to create an integrated European exascale supercomputing infrastructure. After that, another 13 EU countries have joined the declaration.