The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe has a strategic position. It aims to satisfy the most demanding scientific goals, to push the boundaries of researchers’ ambitions and to stretch the development of hardware and software technologies in dimensions that often prove beneficial outside the PRACE research arena. Access to a rich portfolio of applications software and computer systems, including the most powerful systems, is indispensable to any competitive research programme. In all developed nations an ecology of computing resources now exists, ranging from the desktop through the department to the national levels and encompassing both centralised and grid-based distributed arrangements.

For this reason and because of its high costs the 14 PRACE partner states treat the provisioning in a strategic way. The consortium of resources from the PRACE partners will strengthen European science and engineering and supercomputer technologies and thus secure Europe a pioneering role in the global competition. Important element is the commitment of several partners to assure that the members of PRACE will have access to computer systems within Europe second to none.

The basis for the partnership is the report by the body of experts known as the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) compiled for the European Commission in autumn 2006. In this report, the body supports the creation of a supercomputer infrastructure of the highest quality and propose that consistent economical effort, in the order of hundreds of million of Euro, should be laid aside to cover investment costs together.

Over the coming two an a half years PRACE will make concrete proposals on how these funds should be effectively deployed in order to realise the goal of establishing a globally competitive organisation structure for scientific computing in Europe. The principle behind this goal is using the equipment and expertise of the PRACE partners, not in competition with each, but rather as a complement to each other.

The members of  PRACE represent the countries Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. The European Science Foundation is supporting body of PRACE.