On 14 June 2019, Deputy Prime Minster and Minister of the Economy Étienne Schneider, Deputy Director-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology of the European Commission Khalil Rouhana and the CEO of LuxConnect, Roger Lampach, presented the future Luxembourg high performance computer Meluxina. It will be part of the joint initiative EuroHPC. Headquartered in Luxembourg and cofunded by the European Commission and 28 countries, this initiative aims to provide Europe with a world-class HPC ecosystem and infrastructure by the end of 2020.
The European infrastructure will consist of nodes in eight different countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. The Luxembourg HPC will be located in Bissen and put in place with EU cofunding.
Meeting user needs
Meluxina will be focused on user needs. It will be used for research, personalised medicine and e-health projects, but also to meet the needs of companies, in particular SMEs and start-ups. A specific competence centre will guide and support companies with limited competences in this field. The HPC will be hosted and managed by LuxConnect. Initially, 20 new jobs will be created for the implementation of Meluxina and over time it is expected that the HPC competence centre will have a staff of up to 50.
Digital transformation
“The Luxembourg supercomputer Meluxina will support the digital transformation of the economy and offer companies new opportunities to innovate and remain competitive in an increasingly digital world,” said Minister Schneider, and emphasised that this this is well in line with Luxembourg’s new strategy on data-driven innovation. Investing in HPC is also a priority measure in Luxembourg’s strategy for the “third industrial revolution”, developed in collaboration with American economist Jeremy Rifkin, which places digitalisation and the use of data at the centre of economic and social development.
Photo credit: Ministry of the Economy