In the name of the European Commission, I would like to thank the conference organisers for their invitation to participate in the conference opening.
ISC High Performance is the world’s oldest and Europe’s most important conference and exhibition for the HPC community, tackling the most interesting issues of supercomputing and industry innovation.
This year it celebrates its 30th anniversary and will offer a strong five-day technical program focusing on HPC technologies and their applications in scientific fields, as well as their adoption in commercial environments.
HPC is high in the European political agenda as it is recognised as an essential technology to respond to the growing needs of our modern societies, transforming societal challenges into business opportunities, and bringing growth and jobs to the European economy.
The exponential growth of data, networking and computing will continue to drive major advances in science and innovation in the global digital economy. In this sense, HPC has a crucial role to play in the European Digital Single Market strategy and national initiatives such as Industry 4.0, which aim at promoting the digitisation of industry.
In the context of the European HPC strategy, the Commission supports the HPC eco-system by engaging with Member States and private actors. The strategy encourages a strong interplay between technology development, access to HPC resources and application development.
Much has been achieved so far (those interested can attend this afternoon’s session on Horizon 2020 chaired by my colleague Panos), and there are important upcoming steps, such as the large-scale platform integration of the technology building blocks and the coordinated acquisition at EU level of world-class systems.
This conference will bring us closer to our objectives. I wish you all a very fruitful event.
Personal views on research eInfrastructures 