The recently established EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is a joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private partners to develop a world class super-computing ecosystem in Europe. One goal is to install several extreme scale supercomputing systems, the fastest attaining Exascale performance by 2024. In parallel, the European Union supports large research programmes to develop genuinely European computing technology as a part of its strategy towards sovereignty in critical technologies. Building computers fast enough to run the afore-mentioned high performance computations is necessary, but evidently not sufficient: it is the software (building itself on the theoretical models of the underlying phenomena) providing the bridge between theory and physical reality which makes computing so powerful.

The European High Performance Computing Centres of Excellence (HPC CoEs) are building exactly these bridges between the world’s top-notch computers, currently scratching at the Exascale level, and the big societal challenges: they make sure efficient codes are ready for many different disciplines: the fastest computer is of no use if nobody can use it or no software can exploit its capabilities, and thus applications and their support through the HPC CoEs are a core part of the EU and EuroHPC strategy.

In May 2019, 10 HPC CoEs established the European HPC CoE Council (HPC3), supported by the FocusCoE initiave, to bundle forces for joint activities and create a common voice for the high-end HPC application community. This brochure is a joint work of the CoEs by HPC3, to provide some insights in the often very technical world of HPC applications.

The TREX Center of Excellence is part of this group and has been featured in the brochure.

It aims at developing, promoting, and maintaining open source high-performance software solutions in the field of quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics, ready to take advantage of upcoming exascale architectures. TREX gathers European scientists, HPC stakeholders, and companies working on quantum chemistry and condensed matter simulations in the framework of stochastic QMC methods to develop and disseminate these unique computational tools for new materials design and the understanding of the fundamental properties of matter.

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