“Ministers from seven European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) have signed in Rome a declaration to support the next generation of computing and data infrastructures, a European project of the size of Airbus in the 1990s and of Galileo in the 2000s. They plan to establish EuroHPC for acquiring and deploying an integrated world-class high-performance computing infrastructure capable of at least 1018 calculations per second (so-called exascale computers). This will be available across the EU for scientific communities, industry and the public sector, no matter where the users are located. Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market welcomed this important step: “High-performance computing is moving towards its next frontier - more than 100 times faster than the fastest machines currently available in Europe. But not all EU countries have the capacity to build and maintain such infrastructure, or to develop such technologies on their own. If we stay dependent on others for this critical resource, then we risk getting technologically ‘locked’, delayed or deprived of strategic know-how. Europe needs integrated world-class capability in supercomputing to be ahead in the global race. Today’s declaration is a great step forward. I encourage even more EU countries to engage in this ambitious endeavour”. See full speech by Vice-President Ansip at the Digital Day in Rome. High-performance computing (HPC) involves thousands of processors working in parallel to analyse billions of pieces of data in real time. HPC allows to design and new drugs and simulate their effects, and provide faster diagnosis, better treatments and personalised health care. It can make our communications and online financial transactions more secure and can help clean-energy production, by making for example, wind farm operations based on accurate weather forecasts.”