Preannouncement: a joint German-French-Japanese call for projects on exascale computing, available soon online

SPPEXA-2 falls within the scope of societal challenge no. 7 of the ANR’s Work Programme 2015 concerning the information and communication society, and particularly the theme titled Données massives et calcul intensif: enjeux et synergies pour la simulation numérique (“Big data and intensive computing: challenges and synergies for digital simulations”).

Exascale computing: a billion billion operations per second

Scientists seek to gain an understanding of natural disasters such as tsunamis, and analyze massive amounts of data in record time, through the use of ever more powerful supercomputers, which are designed to achieve the highest possible performance. The petaflop barrier (i.e. a million billion operations per second) was broken in the US in 2008, and since then scientists have been seeking to move to the next stage, namely exascale computing. Overcoming the obstacles to the emergence of exascale data processing and computing capacities is crucial in order to take full advantage of these new resources.

An international initiative aimed at promoting research on exascale computing

SPEXXA is a brand new international initiative that is an outgrowth of a DFG programme launched in 2013. Opening up the initiative to international participants comes on the heels of the success of the German initiative, as well as other global initiatives such as the pilot G8-HORCs programme in 2010-2011 on environmental applications of exascale computing, and the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI).

The SPPEXA-2 call for proposals will finance bilateral or trilateral collaborative projects of three years’ duration, with the goal of enabling German, French and Japanese teams to work together. The DFG will act as the lead agency for SPPEXA-2, i.e. it will be in charge of the reception and evaluation process. Funding decisions will be made jointly and each agency will finance its own country’s teams.

For this particular call, the ANR will solely be financing the French teams that are involved in three-year trilateral projects.

The call should be open from 15 September 2014 to 31 January 2015, and the projects that are ultimately selected are slated to get underway in January 2016.

For further information: