The specialists from the University of Tartu create unified and secure access to Europe's supercomputers

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking integrates supercomputers, quantum computing, and interconnected data infrastructure across Europe with the help of specialists from the University of Tartu High Performance Computing Center to facilitate access to computational power for European scientists and businesses.

Under the leadership of EuroHPC, nine state-of-the-art supercomputers are operating in various locations across Europe, with six quantum computers soon to be added. To simplify access to these machines, a tender was organised to create the EuroHPC Federation Platform. The competition was won by a consortium, in which the University of Tartu will contribute to enhancing Europe's high-performance computing ecosystem and support the development of European science, education, and business.

"Supercomputers and high-performance computing help process large amounts of data quickly. This is essential in research and development to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning and to perform complex simulations," said Ivar Koppel, Head of the High Performance Computing Centre at the University of Tartu. According to him, a drawback of the European supercomputing ecosystem is that each supercomputer has a unique architecture, and users are managed differently across computing centres. "Thanks to the EuroHPC Federation Platform, a connection will be created between European supercomputers, artificial intelligence systems, quantum computing, and data infrastructure. This will make high-performance computing easier and improve access to cutting-edge technology for European countries," explained Koppel.

The Waldur software, developed at the University of Tartu, will be used on the Federation Platform to share computing resources. Therefore, the university plays a vital role in ensuring better accessibility to EuroHPC computing systems and, as a result, the broader adoption of these systems. The platform's clients will include the European scientific community, businesses, and public sector institutions. In the future, there are plans to integrate artificial intelligence factories being built in Europe with the same platform.

The consortium developing the EuroHPC Federated Platform is led by CSC – IT Center for Science (Finland). It includes the University of Tartu, the pan-European research network GÉANT, Ghent University (Belgium), the University of Ostrava (Czech Republic), and NORDUnet. The project’s cost is 20 million euros, and it is supported by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program. The platform's development began in January of this year and will last five years.