This requires a periodic renewal of the systems and a continuous upgrade of the infrastructure. Furthermore, novel architectures and system designs will be created by the vendors for leadership systems. At any given time there will be between three and five different systems each of them serving a particular application spectrum best.

This fact mandates a distributed Research Infrastructure, since no single site can host all the necessary systems because of floor space, power, and cooling demands. PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has the goal to create the prerequisites for such a pan-European HPC service satisfying the objectives mentioned above and to move into the implementation phase as early as end of 2009, beginning of 2010.

The infrastructure will be complemented with network and grid access, and the services required to enable applications. These include development of parallel application software expertise, packages, and data handling. It will build on the partners’ experience and use concepts and services from EC-funded projects such as GÉANT2 and DEISA.

The partnership will collaborate with European IT-industry to influence the development of emerging technologies and components for promising architectures for Petaflop/s systems that will be procurable after 2010.

The pan-European HPC service will be a part of the European Research Area, in which the Seventh Framework Programme is prepared to invest hundreds of millions of Euros.

A European model of a sustainable high performance ecosystem consists of a small number of supercomputer centres offering computing service at the highest performance level; national and regional centres with supercomputers offering a the performance to run most of the advanced computing; and the local computing centres in universities, research labs or in other organizations strengthening software development and researchers’ competence in computational science.