The project encourages collaboration, exchange of knowledge between HPC practitioners, expertise and best practices between Participating States and the mapping of skills and competences across Europe to support cohesion and a more consistent level of expertise across Europe. In this next phase of the project, the CASTIEL 2 project also takes on an additional role of providing similar coordination support to the EuroHPC Centres of Excellence (CoEs). The CoEs gather HPC expertise in the development of HPC applications by scientific domain at a European level, CASTIEL 2 will build a stronger HPC community which will foster strategic collaboration in HPC research and deployment of skills and in expertise in HPC technologies and applications between CoEs and NCCs. The objective of CASTIEL 2 and EuroCC 2 is to strengthen the European Union (EU)’s technological autonomy and competitiveness by ensuring a coordinated and consistent high level of knowledge sharing across Europe in HPC and related disciplines such as high-performance data analytics (HPDA) and HPC-based artificial intelligence.

The project was selected following the call DIGITAL-EUROHPC-JU-2022-NCC-01.

CASTIEL 2 will run for a 3-year period starting 1st January 2023 and receive up to €3 million funding from the Digital Europe Programme.

EuroCC 2 and Castiel 2 follow on from EuroCC and Castiel, which started on 1 September 2020 and ran for two years. The two projects received funding from Horizon 2020.

The two projects will continue to be coordinated by the High-Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart (HLRS), one of three German national supercomputing centres within the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.