Article 1 Tasks

The Joint Undertaking shall carry out the following tasks:

1. (a)

   mobilise public and private sector funds for the financing of the activities of the Joint Undertaking;

2. (b)

   launch calls for tenders for the acquisition of pre-exascale supercomputers and acquire at least two world-class pre-exascale supercomputers, funded by the Union's budget stemming from Horizon 2020, CEF and by contributions from the relevant Participating States to the Joint Undertaking;

3. (c)

   launch, jointly with the contracting authorities of the Participating State where the hosting entity is established or with the contracting authorities of Participating States in the hosting consortium, calls for tenders for the acquisition of petascale supercomputers and acquire, jointly with these contracting authorities, at least two petascale supercomputers; this joint procurement shall be funded by the Union's budget stemming from Horizon 2020 and by contributions from the relevant Participating States;

4. (d)

   initiate and manage the calls for expression of interest for hosting petascale and pre-exascale supercomputers and evaluate the offers received, with the support of independent external experts;

5. (e)

   select the hosting entity of the petascale and pre-exascale supercomputers in a fair, open and transparent manner, in accordance with Article 8 of this Regulation;

6. (f)

   conclude a hosting agreement in accordance with Article 9 of this Regulation with the hosting entity for the operation and maintenance of the pre-exascale supercomputers and monitor the contractual compliance with the hosting agreement, including the acceptance test of the acquired supercomputers;

7. (g)

   conclude, jointly with the other co-owners, a hosting agreement in accordance with Article 9 of this Regulation with the hosting entity for the operation and maintenance of the petascale supercomputers and monitor, jointly with the other co-owners, the contractual compliance with the hosting agreement;

8. (h)

   define general and specific conditions for allocating the Union's share of access time to the petascale and pre-exascale supercomputers and monitor access to these supercomputers in accordance with Article 13 of this Regulation;

9. (i)

   define general and specific conditions for allocating access time to national supercomputers and monitor access to these supercomputers in accordance with Article 13 of this Regulation;

10. (j)

    initiate open calls for proposals and award funding in accordance with Regulation (EU) No 1290/2013 and within the limits of available funds, to indirect actions mainly in the form of grants, focusing on:

    1. (i)

       the development of the next generation of key High Performance Computing towards exascale addressing the whole spectrum of technologies from low-power microprocessors and related middleware technologies to software, programming models and tools, to novel architectures and their system integration through a co-design approach;

    2. (ii)

       new and upscaling algorithms and codes for existing and emerging innovative applications, test-beds and demonstration activities;

    3. (iii)

       outreach activities, awareness raising actions and professional development activities for attracting human resources to High Performance Computing, training them and increasing skills and engineering know-how of the ecosystem across the Union; this may include coordination and support actions, support to existing or new Centres of Excellence, as well as to the creation of national High Performance Computing competence centres and their wide networking cooperation and activity coordination across the Union;

11. (k)

    monitor the implementation of the actions and manage grant agreements;

12. (l)

    ensure the efficiency of the European High Performance Computing initiative, based on a set of appropriate measures;

13. (m)

    monitor overall progress towards achieving the objectives of the Joint Undertaking;

14. (n)

    develop close cooperation and ensure coordination with Union and national activities, bodies and stakeholders, creating synergies and improving exploitation of research and innovation results in the area of high performance computing;

15. (o)

    define the multiannual strategic plan, draw up and implement the corresponding annual work plans for their execution and make any necessary adjustments to the multiannual strategic plan;

16. (p)

    engage in information, communication, exploitation and dissemination activities by applying mutatis mutandis Article 28 of Regulation (EU) No 1291/2013, including making the detailed information on results from calls for proposals available and accessible in a common Horizon 2020 e-database;

17. (q)

    any other task needed to achieve the objectives set out in Article 3 of this Regulation.