The University of Galway has signed a hosting agreement with the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) for the deployment of the CASPIr supercomputer.

Described as a “mid-range” system, 15 petaflops CASPIr will be operated by the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), based at the university.

The system will be co-funded by the Irish government’s Department for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation, and Science, and EuroHPC JU as part of a five-year collaboration agreement. In a statement, the partners said the procurement process for the supercomputer will begin “in the immediate future.”

The new supercomputer will serve a wide range of users in the scientific community, industry, and the public sector, supporting AI and machine learning workloads, in addition to small-scale training and inference tasks as part of larger simulation and data analysis workflows.

CASPIr will be the successor to the ICHEC’s Kay supercomputer, which had 665 teraflops of compute power but was decommissioned in November 2023.

Following the shutdown of that system, the Irish government was criticized by opposition parties for failing to acquire a new supercomputer. In May 2024, Sinn Féin’s Louise O'Reilly said that “the failure by the government to invest in this critical infrastructure has embarrassed Ireland in the eyes of the European and international technology community.”

Ireland was selected as the host site for a EuroHPC supercomputer in June 2022, but when O'Reilly made her comments, no timeline for the deployment of CASPIr had been shared.

“The signature of this Agreement with EuroHPC represents an important milestone for Ireland,” said ICHEC director, Professor JC Desplat. “It paves the way to the procurement of CASPIr, one of a new generation of supercomputers designed to execute sophisticated computer models known as ‘digital twins’, with broad domains of applications ranging from health and life sciences, to the search for new materials, mitigating the impact of climate change, and improving mobility within our cities.”

EuroHPC JU selects 13 AI factory antennas

Elsewhere this week, the EuroHPC JU announced it has selected 13 “AI factory antennas” following the call for proposals that was issued by the initiative in April of this year.

Funded by a €55 million ($64m) investment package from the EU, which has been matched by contributions from the EuroHPC JU participating states, each antenna will support an established AI factory from its respective country, providing “access to AI-optimized supercomputing resources for research, innovation, and industrial applications in different fields.”

The EuroHPC JU added that, where relevant, an AI factory antenna would also provide small-scale AI compute resources for the fine-tuning, testing, and validation of AI applications.

The 13 antennas are: BE-AIFA in Belgium; Pharos-CY in Cyprus; HunAIFA in Hungary; AIFA ICE in Iceland; AIF IRL-Antenna in Ireland; AIFA-LAT in Latvia; CALYPSO in Malta; FAIMA in Moldova; VEZILKDA in North Macedonia; SAIFA in Serbia; SKAIAT in Slovakia; HEARTS in Switzerland; and UKAIFA in the UK.

Last week, the EuroHPC JU added six new AI factories to its network of existing hubs, bringing the total number across Europe to 19.