EU supercomputing too slow, says commissioner

Sluggish progress in supercomputing could lead to a brain drain in Europe, Mariya Gabriel, the EU’s commissioner for the digital economy, has warned.

At a briefing in Brussels on 29 August, Gabriel said that EU member states needed to combine their efforts and work with the European Commission on supercomputing. “We are not in the top 10 or the top five in the world when it comes to high-performance computing but we have the potential to do it,” she said.  

In her speech, Gabriel said that nine member states were already combining their national initiatives on high-performance computing, and that she hoped to bring others into this grouping in the next few months. “We cannot forget the holistic approach,” she said. “There is a risk of fragmentation."