EUPEX leverages the best of the assets developed in previous H2020 projects to design, build and validate the first HPC platform integrating the full spectrum of European HPC technologies, from architecture, processors and interconnect to system software. The EUPEX pilot system is:

• modular, thanks to the OpenSequana-compliant hardware platform and the matching HPC software ecosystem implementing the Modular Supercomputing Architecture, so as to be able to integrate and manage efficiently a variety of hardware modules, including upcoming architectures, and to handle heterogeneous workflows,
• large enough to be a proof of concept for a modular architecture relying on European technologies, and in particular on the European processor technology (EPI), and to demonstrate the Exascale readiness of the applications selected for co-design
• production-grade, thanks to technical choices guided by the maturity of the European solutions available.

EUPEX is not just about building a hardware prototype: the consortium will devote as much effort to the system software stack and to the applications as to hardware. A set of applications selected from a large variety of domains (climate and weather forecast, biology and health, remote sensing analysis, material science, astrophysics, engineering, seismology) will be optimized for the target architecture, used for benchmarking on the EUPEX Pilot, and analysed to issue recommendations for exploitation on future European Exascale systems.

The EUPEX consortium brings together 17 European organizations in a balanced alliance between established European technology suppliers and vendors, recognized research organisations and universities, European-scale computing centres, and application owners. This mix of public and private sector stakeholders is a guarantee that the innovative research achieved by the consortium will quickly translate into European-grown industrialised solutions that will reduce Europe’s dependence on foreign supercomputing technologies.

In a context where the European Union is striving to regain its digital sovereignty, turning from a simple user of computer technologies into a self-reliant player capable of designing, developing, manufacturing, marketing and efficiently using all the necessary technological bricks, it is an essential asset to master extreme-scale supercomputing technologies, an asset whose success will percolate through the entire computing continuum.