Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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260. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if he has been briefed regarding concerns within the higher education system concerning Ireland's falling ranking in the area of high performance computing; the investments by his Department in this area over the past ten years; his plans to address concerns that Ireland's research infrastructure is being undermined by underperformance in this area; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [26801/16]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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High Performance Computing (HPC) services include the provision and support of high-end computing resources, data analytics, education and training services to industry and higher education institutions. Globally, supercomputers are playing an ever increasing and critically important role in a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields of relevance to cloud technologies, big data, materials research, healthcare, climate research, weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration amongst others.

Ireland is committed to establishing a world-class research environment characterised by world-class research outputs, populated by researchers of excellence working within a world-class research infrastructure. Ensuring access to high performance computing (HPC) for computational scientists is integral to the achievement of this overall vision.

Recent data from our higher education system shows that as a whole it has performed very strongly in recent years in terms of graduate output from ICT related programmes. Eurostat data for 2012 shows Ireland as having the highest percentage of students studying science, maths and computing in the EU. Since 2012, ICT graduate numbers have continued to increase with output from ICT related programmes at levels 8 to 10 increasing from 2,362 in 2012 to 3,341 in 2014.

The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is the national High-Performance Computing Centre in Ireland. Established in 2005, ICHEC operates the national HPC service providing computer resources and software expertise for the research community through collaborative partnerships and programmes of education. Other universities, such as Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and the Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork also possess HPC expertise and facilities.

Following a national review in 2012 of HPC facilities and capacity in Ireland and following consideration of the resulting report, the Department of Education and Skills and the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation agreed that they would jointly provide core funding to ICHEC to enable it to continue to provide this important service nationally. The joint-funding from both Departments amounted to €1.4 million annually over the period 2013 to 2015 - €700,000 from each Department. For 2016 both Departments agreed to increase their level of funding to a total allocation of €1.8 million, and will increase to €2 million in 2017.

A summary of the joint DJEI- DES funding made to ICHEC since 2013 is as follows:

The core funding provided by the two Departments leverages approximately twice this funding in competitive awards from agencies such as Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland, from industry and from EU research programmes.

In addition to this funding, and under its Research Infrastructure Call, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) provided funding of €3.7 million towards the purchase of a new supercomputer for ICHEC. This funding was made to ICHEC in 2013.  I understand that ICHEC has submitted an application for additional capital investment in HPC facilities under a recent SFI Research Infrastructure Call and that its application is in the final stages of review.

The Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation is presently evaluating continued membership of the European PRACE HPC programme, which would enable Irish Researchers to access the biggest HPC systems in Europe on a competitive basis and access supercomputing and data analysis resources to help drive discoveries and new developments in all areas of science from fundamental research through to applied sciences including mathematics and computer sciences.