Building an HPC Ecosystem in Europe

During 2006 there has been intense work in Europe in order to increase European competitiveness in high-end computing and grid collaboration. Various new activities have been started in addition to the existing European grid projects, such as EGEE and DEISA. High-performance computing in Europe taskforce (HET) has drafted a strategy for European HPC ecosystem with a focus in enabling European centers with a computing capability beyond petaflop. Collaboration of the various national grid initiatives, European grid initiative (EGI), has been planned with a focus on transparent interoperability between national cluster environments. European strategy forum for research infrastructures (ESFRI) has published a roadmap with 35 major new experiments, all requiring data management capabilities and many of them in addition high end computing. Integration of activities and tight collaboration between the various European initiatives is essential in order to manage the growing complexity.