Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Membership of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) has directly benefited Irish SMEs. In particular EuroHPC has financially supported the SME Accelerator programme at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing under the European High-Performance Computing Competence Centre (EuroCC) initiative.

EuroCC is an initiative by the Joint Undertaking to build a European network of national high-performance computing (HPC) competence centres to bridge existing skills gaps. In Ireland the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) was selected to host the national competence centre, EuroCC_Ireland. EuroCC_Ireland, a project co-funded by the Department and EuroHPC, has directly supported SMEs in Ireland through the SME Accelerator programme.

The SME Accelerator provides Irish SMEs with access to HPC technical skills and infrastructure and assists with technical solutions. Under this co-funded programme SMEs receive training and one-to-one mentoring with highly skilled HPC staff employed in ICHEC. The programme also assists SMEs looking to migrate their work onto world-class EuroHPC supercomputers.

ICHEC activities as the EuroHPC competence centre include support for Irish academic and enterprise organisations using high-performance computing, high performance data analysis and artificial intelligence. The competence centre offers a broad portfolio of services in all HPC-related areas, tailored to the needs of industry, science and public administration.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Membership of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) has directly benefited the Irish research community. Working with Participating States, EuroHPC has built a world-leading ecosystem of supercomputers and related infrastructure in Europe. Through EuroHPC Ireland’s research community can access a number of world-class supercomputers far more powerful than what is publicly available within Ireland. Researchers in Irish institutions have been successful in securing time on these machines through competitive calls.

EuroHPC has actively supported Irish researchers’ access to these supercomputers by funding relevant programmes at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) under their competence centre initiative. Co-funded by EuroHPC and my Department, ICHEC runs an Academic Flagship programme which prepares Irish academic user communities to compete for the large-scale systems offered by EuroHPC. Academic Flagship projects have included research on artificial intelligence and deep learning, astronomical modelling and particle physics.

The competence centre programme at ICHEC, supported by EuroHPC, has also established the HPC Innovation Hub which is directed at public sector organisations. This programme has enabled public sector organisations to progress their digital transformations using high-performance computing.

EuroHPC has also provided opportunities for Ireland’s high-performance computing community to collaborate on projects with European partners. ICHEC is currently part of a consortium led by France and co-funded by EuroHPC to deploy a quantum computer. This is cutting-edge work to develop quantum computers which will be made available for research and development purposes to a wide range of European users.