EU to launch $1.2 billion supercomputer plan sans UK

Bloomberg

The European Union will spend one billion euros ($1.2 billion) to try to catch up to China, the US and Japan in supercomputing, the European Commission said.
But as the initiative launches, uncertainty over Brexit is creating anxiety among British computer scientists that the UK may miss out on opportunities from the plan.
The goal of the project is for Europe to acquire two “world-class” supercomputers, capable of at least a hundred million billion calculations per second, and at least two mid-range systems, capable of tens of millions of billions of calculations per second, by 2020. The EuroHPC initiative was launched in March 2017, with funding specifics unveiled this week.
These machines are stepping stones towards the ultimate goal of the effort, which is to create a next generation “exascale” system—capable of performing at least one billion billion mathematical calculations per second—“based on EU technology” by 2022.
The Commission called the initiative “crucial for the EU’s competitiveness and independence in the data economy.”
The EU itself will provide 486 million euros for the project by 2020, with a similar amount coming from individual members states and “associated countries” that sign up for the project. The Commission said private entities, such as companies, could also join the effort and provide “in kind contributions”.
Since it was launched in 2017, 13 countries have formally signed up: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland.

UK Absence
The UK has not formally joined the project so far and some British computer scientists worry that the UK will miss out on the potential benefits of the project due to Brexit.
Alastair Clifton, a spokesman for the UK’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the department that administers
the British government’s science budget, declined to say why the UK had not yet signed the project’s formal declaration. While not yet a signatory, Clifton said the UK, had been “taking an active part in development of it and are working on future plans of it”. He said that whether the UK would become a signatory in the future “is an open question”.
“Brexit has thrown a lot of uncertainty around the UK’s participation and it is really unfortunate and causing delay and confusion,” Simon McIntosh-Smith, a professor specialising in high-performance computing at the University of Bristol, said.
Currently, the top two fastest supercomputers are in China, with the US and Japan dominating the most of the rest of the top 10.
European companies, from carmakers like Daimler AG to aerospace giants such as Airbus SE and pharmaceutical firms like GlaxoSmithKline Plc, as well as government departments, particularly weather agencies, increasingly have to rent computing time on supercomputers located in the US or Japan.
The EU is concerned that doing so increases the chances that sensitive information—including commercial trade secrets and sensitive personal data—could leak. What’s more, in the event of a political crisis, Europe’s access to these supercomputers might be cut off, experts warn.
They point to the situation in China, which was forced to develop its own high-performance computing processors after its access to ones from American companies was cut off by the US government.
“It is a tough race and today the EU is lagging behind,” Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s vice president for the digital single market, said in a statement. “We want to give European researchers and companies world-leading supercomputer capacity by 2020.”