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The historic city centre of Porto, on the banks of the world-famous Douro River, was the stage for the kick-off meeting of the EPICURE project (High-level specialised application support service in High-Performance Computing), an initiative that draws on the experience and knowledge of the host institutions of the EuroHPC JU network of supercomputers: three pre-exascale, five petascale and two future exascale.

The aim of EPICURE? To provide users with Level 2 and Level 3 support, with advanced technical support that allows them, for example, to move from system to system – regardless of the supercomputer’s architecture – more quickly and without constraints.

“At the moment, most of the help provided to users is short-term support that requires basic HPC skills and competences,” said Emmanuel Ory, Development Manager at CSC – IT Centre for Science and coordinator of the project. “EPICURE will be ready to help users at an advanced technical level. At the moment, all the different sites in Europe use different architectures, so users need to be able to move from one system to another very easily and seamlessly,” Ory continues.

In the north of Portugal, representatives of the 16 partners that make up the project met face-to-face for the first time to discuss and align procedures and objectives, but also to explain the work that each work package will carry out over the next four years.

This period will also be marked by numerous training events in the form of workshops, webinars and hackathons, which will be held in a hybrid format and in different countries of the European Union.

CSC – IT Center for Science (Finland) is the Coordinator of the consortium which includes 16 partners from 14 different countries:  Barcelona Supercomputing Centre – Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion (Spain), Cineca Consorzio Unteruniversitario (Italy), VSB – Technical University of Ostrava (Czechia), Institut Informacijskih Znanosti (Slovenia), Luxprovide SA (Luxembourg), INESC TEC – Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Tecnologia e Ciência (Portugal), Sofia Tech Park JSC (Bulgaria), Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium), Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan (Sweden), Akademia Gorniczo-Hutnicza IM. Stanislawa Staszica W Krakowie (Poland), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (Denmark), Forschungszentrum Julich Gmbh (Germany), Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif (France). Also joining EPICURE project are Institut Jozef Stefan (Slovenia) and Centre Informatique National de L’Enseignement Superieur (France) as affiliated entities.