The EUPEX consortium aims to design, build, and validate the first EU platform for HPC, covering end-to-end the spectrum of required technologies with European assets: from the architecture, processor, system software, development tools to the applications. The EUPEX prototype will be designed to be open, scalable and flexible, including the modular OpenSequana-compliant platform and the corresponding HPC software ecosystem for the Modular Supercomputing Architecture. Scientifically, EUPEX is a vehicle to prepare HPC, AI, and Big Data processing communities for upcoming European Exascale systems and technologies. The hardware platform is sized to be large enough for relevant application preparation and scalability forecast, and a proof of concept for a modular architecture relying on European technologies in general and on European Processor Technology (EPI) in particular. In this context, a strong emphasis is put on the system software stack and the applications. Being the first of its kind, EUPEX sets the ambitious challenge of gathering, distilling and integrating European technologies that the scientific and industrial partners use to build a production-grade prototype. EUPEX will lay the foundations for Europe's future digital sovereignty. It has the potential for the creation of a sustainable European scientific and industrial HPC ecosystem and should stimulate science and technology more than any national strategy (for numerical simulation, machine learning and AI, Big Data processing). The EUPEX consortium – constituted of key actors on the European HPC scene – has the capacity and the will to provide a fundamental contribution to the consolidation of European supercomputing ecosystem. EUPEX aims to directly support an emerging and vibrant European entrepreneurial ecosystem in AI and Big Data processing that will leverage HPC as a main enabling technology.

We are entering the Cyber-Physical age, in which both objects and people will become nodes of the same digital network for exchanging information. Therefore, in our imaginary, the general expectation is that “things” or systems will become somewhat smart as people, allowing rapid and close interactions not only system-system, but also human-system, system-human. More scientifically, we expect that such Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) will at least react in real-time, have enough computational power for the assigned tasks, consume the least possible energy for such task (energy efficiency), scale up through modularity, allow for an easy programmability across performance scaling and exploit at best existing standards at minimal costs. The whole set of these expectations impose scientific and technological challenges that need to be properly addressed. The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) aims at researching new software/hardware architectures for CPSs to meet the above expectations. The technical approach aims at solving fundamental problems to enable easy programmability of multi-core multi-board systems through the open-source OmpSs programming model, leveraging Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) inspired concepts across the modules. The OmpSs will allow accelerating functions through an FPGA (Agility). In particular, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that DSM will be effectively demonstrated on an embedded modular system (eXtensibility). Modular scalability will be possible thanks to a fast interconnect that will enrich the module. To this aim, an innovative modular ARM-based board with enhanced capabilities for interfacing with the physical world will be designed and demonstrated in key scenarios such as Smart Video-Surveillance and Smart Living/Home (Domotic).