This proposal describes the third core project of the Graphene Flagship. It forms the fourth phase of the FET flagship and is characterized by a continued transition towards higher technology readiness levels, without jeopardizing our strong commitment to fundamental research. Compared to the second core project, this phase includes a substantial increase in the market-motivated technological spearhead projects, which account for about 30% of the overall budget. The broader fundamental and applied research themes are pursued by 15 work packages and supported by four work packages on innovation, industrialization, dissemination and management. The consortium that is involved in this project includes over 150 academic and industrial partners in over 20 European countries.

Europe has made significant progress in becoming a leader in large parts of the HPC ecosystem: from industrial and scientific application providers via system software to Exascale systems, bringing together technical and business stakeholders. Despite such gains, excellence in research in high performance computing systems is fragmented across Europe and opportunities for synergy missed. At this moment, there is fierce international competition to sustain long-term leadership in HPC technology and there remains much to do. Europe intends to increase the budget spent on HPC by 1 billion euros. In order to realize the full potential of this investment, it will have to engage all the stakeholders, industrial as well as academic. EUROLAB4HPC’s bold overall goal is to build connected and sustainable leadership in high-performance computing systems by bringing together the leading performance orientated communities in Europe, working across all layers of the system stack, fuelling new industries in HPC. EUROLAB4HPC’s overarching goal is to Strengthen academic research excellence and innovation in HPC in Europe. This will be realised by means of four short-term objectives: (i) Structuring the community – by adding members to develop a community of excellence that engages in focussed high-quality cross-stack activity; (ii) Promoting entrepreneurship - by building an innovation pipeline from general purpose entrepreneurial training, business prototyping, business plan development and helping with funding, (iii) Stimulating technology transfer - by connecting with other technology transfer activities and providing competitive seed funding for HPC technology transfer, and (iv) Disseminating community news – by investing substantial resources in dissemination activities, creating a stronger EUROLAB brand. This will raise the visibility of the community, attract more participants and eventually grows the interest and impact of Europe’s Exascale research.