Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.[1]
In June 2011, France's Tera 100 was certified the fastest supercomputer in Europe, and ranked 9th in the world.[2][3][4] It was the first petaflops-scale supercomputer designed and built in Europe.[5]
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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Sofia operates an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which offers high-performance processing to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University, among other organizations.[6] This system is one of the few supercomputers in Eastern Europe, and the only one in the Balkans. The system was on the TOP500 list until November 2009, when it ranked as number 379.[7]
The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives operates the Tera 100 machine in the Research and Technology Computing Center in Essonne, Île-de-France. The Tera 100 has a peak processing speed of 1,050 teraflops, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe as of 2011.[8] Built by Groupe Bull, it has 140,000 processors.[9]
The National Computer Center of Higher Education (French acronym: CINES) was established in Montpellier in 1999, and offers computer services for research and higher education.[10][11] It operates the Jade SGI Altix system, which has a peak processing speed of 237 teraflops, and is the third-fastest supercomputer in France, the second-fastest being a commercial system operated by a French manufacturing company.
The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing jointly own the JUGENE, the fastest supercomputer in Germany, at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in North Rhine-Westphalia. JUGENE is based on IBM's Blue Gene/P architecture, and in June 2011 was ranked the 12th-fastest computer in the world by TOP500.[12] The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, a supercomputing center in Munich, houses the SuperMUC system which is expected to begin operating in 2012 at a processing speed of 3 petaflops. This will be, at the time it enters service, the fastest supercomputer in Europe.
The High Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart maintains a large number of medium-sized computing platforms, rather than possessing a small number of very high-end systems.[13] The UNICORE initiative, a grid computing project by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, aims to provide seamless access to distributed computing resources such as supercomputers or cluster systems.
The European Grid Infrastructure, a continent-wide distributed computing system, is headquartered at the Science Park in Amsterdam.[14]
The Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid began in 2009 as a nationwide computing infrastructure. The Galera computer cluster at the Gdansk University of Technology was ranked 299th on the TOP500 list in November 2010.[15][16]
In Nov 2011, the 33072 processor Lomonosov supercomputer in Moscow developed by T-Platforms ranked number 18 in the world, and 3rd in Europe after France and Germany.[17] The system uses Xeon 2.93 GHz, Nvidia 2070 GPUs, and an Infiniband interconnect.[17] In Nov 2011 Russia had no other entry in the top 100 supercomputers.[18]
In July 2011 The Russian government announced a plan to focus on larger supercomputers by 2020.[19] T-Plaforms has stated it will deliver a water cooled supercomputer in 2013.[20]
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is located at the Technical University of Catalonia, and operates the 94.21-teraflop MareNostrum computer. The Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa) research center at the Technical University of Madrid operates the 72-teraflop Magerit supercomputer, which uses 86 IBM BladeCenters. The Spanish Supercomputing Network furthermore provides access to several supercomputers distributed across Spain.
Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology operates the Lindgren supercomputer, which consists of 36,000 processors and operates at 305 teraflops.[21]
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre was founded in 1991 and is operated by ETH Zurich. It is based in Manno, Ticino, and provides supercomputing services to national research institutions and Swiss universities, as well as the international CERN organisation and MeteoSchweiz, the Swiss weather service.[22] In February 2011, the center placed an order for a Cray XMT massively parallel supercomputer.[23]
The IBM Aquasar supercomputer became operational at ETH Zurich in 2010. It uses hot water cooling to achieve heat efficiency, with the computation-heated water used to heat the buildings of the university campus.[24][25]
The EPCC supercomputer center at the University of Edinburgh was established in 1990.[26] The HECToR project at the University of Edinburgh provides supercomputing services using a 360-teraflop Cray XE6 system, the fastest supercomputer in the UK.[27] The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, Berkshire, operates a 100-teraflop IBM pSeries-based system.