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, the European network of supercomputers.
EuroHPC, based in the Grand Duchy, is an initiative co-financed by the European Commission and 28 countries, including Luxembourg, to provide Europe with an excellent ecosystem and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure by the end of 2020.
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 and will have a capacity of 10 petaflops (or 10,000,000,000,000,000 computing operations per second).
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.
“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 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.
