The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed a contract with GÉANT, to provide ultra-high bandwidth, secure, pan-European, interconnect services for the EuroHPC supercomputing infrastructure.
GÉANT, a leading European association of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), of which Arnes is a member, will provide the planning, implementation, and operation of hyperconnectivity infrastructure over the next four years. The association of European national research and education networks was selected in a public tender EUROHPC/2024/OP/0008, which was alaunched by the EuroHPC JU in December 2024. The contract, valued at up to 60 million EURO, covers the design, implementation, and operation of the hyperconnectivity infrastructure over a period of 48 months. With this agreement, Europe takes a major step in strengthening its supercomputing ecosystem.
The new infrastructure, with its extremely high bandwidth, will greatly improve data exchange between EuroHPC supercomputers, national supercomputers, AI factories, quantum ifacilities, as well as research and data centres across Europe, with transfer capacities in the terabit range.
European users of the hyper-connected supercomputer ecosystem will thus have access to high-performance data transfer with a target transfer rate in the terabits per second range, based on a proven, reliable, and secure multi-country system that combines the reach and expertise of European national research and education networks. In Slovenia, this will enable the upgrade of Arnes’ connection to GÉANT and the connection to the Vega supercomputer to 1.2 Tb/s.
Initial deployment activities are expected to begin in the coming months, with the first services becoming available to users in 2026.
