#56 The data economy powered by High Performance Computing | Pascal Bouvry and Roger Lampach

LuxUnplugged Podcast

Adrien and Thierry welcome Pascal Bouvry and Roger Lampach, co-CEOs at LuxProvide, to the show. Both from complementary backgrounds, Pascal and Roger walk them through the very genesis of LuxProvide which operates one of Luxembourg's major supercomputers or high performance computers (HPC), MeluXina.
The two co-CEOs then discuss how Luxembourg and other European countries convinced the European Commission to raise the HPC topic as an Important Project of Common European Interest in order to compete with other major geographies like the US and China which already possess such an essential piece of infrastructure powering their data economy. The fruit of those efforts led to the creation of EuroHPC, the very body promoting the development of HPC infrastructure in several European countries, where Luxembourg is one of the chosen locations in Bissen.
Decrypting the HPC jargon, Pascal and Roger provide further details on the use of petaflops as computing power in the context of business applications, and how that compares with traditional high street machines.
An established Computer Science professor at the University of Luxembourg (Uni.lu), Pascal enthusiastically discusses the new pan-European master's degree in HPC that is launching in September 2022. Spearheaded by Uni.lu, this project is meant to lay the foundations for the next generation that will support the data and knowledge ecosystems in the value chain and, later down the line, pave the way for quantum computing. Naturally, he details what type of candidate should apply for this exciting programme.
Finally, they keenly review a number of sectors that are most likely to benefit in the future from the implementation of the HPC infrastructure in Luxembourg and across Europe. Roger and Pascal also float the idea that Europe should bring closer to home the manufacturing of computing hardware, such as semi-conductors, in light of the supply chain crunches that occurred during the pandemic.