PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing, was established in May 2010 as a permanent pan-European High Performance Computing service providing world-class systems for world-class science. Six systems at the highest performance level (Tier-0) are deployed by Germany, France, Italy and Spain providing researchers with over 9 billion core hours of compute time. HPC experts from twenty-five member states - funded in part in three implementation projects - enabled users from academia and industry to ascertain leadership and remain competitive in the Global Race. Currently PRACE is preparing for PRACE 2.0, the successor of the initial five year period. The objectives of PRACE-4IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include: assisting the transition to PRACE 2.0; strengthening the internationally recognised PRACE brand; continuing advanced training which so far provided more than 15.000 person-training days to over 4700 persons, preparing strategies and best practices towards exascale computing, coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services, and supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures. The proven project structure will be used to achieve each of the objectives in six dedicated work packages. The project will continue to be managed by Jülich. The activities are designed to increase Europe's research and innovation potential especially through: seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities; promoting take-up by industry and special offers to SMEs; analysing new flexible business models for PRACE 2.0; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, the coming CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies.

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.