SRA 4

The fourth issue of our Strategic Research Agenda (SRA 4) was released in March 2020. The process of writing this document - i.e. defining a technological model, main areas, working groups and their leaders - started in February 2019. The objective of SRA 4 is to help the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking define its HPC technology priorities priorities for the rest of the new European Research programme - Horizon Europe (or FP9). Four ETP4HPC representatives and three observers are present on the Research and Innovation Advisory Group of EuroHPC, which is chaired by the ETP4HPC chairman.

All members of ETP4HPC were invited to register their interest in working with an SRA 4 Working Group and suggest a Research Cluster. Our work on the SRA was supported by EXDCI-2 and involved many of our academic and industrial members as well as organisations from the related areas of Big Data and IoT (BDVA, HiPEAC...).

This SRA’s structure differs from those of the previous SRAs. We have kept the concept of vertical areas (see figure), corresponding to the different elements of the supercomputing stack or the use of HPC. The following is a list of the corresponding Working Groups and their Leaders (and Organisations).

System Architecture – Laurent Cargemel (Atos) and Estela Suarez (Juelich SC)
System Hardware Components – Marc Duranton (CEA) and Benny Koren (Mellanox)
System Software & Management – Pascale Rossé-Laurent (Atos) and María S. Pérez-Hernández (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Programming Environment – Guy Lonsdale (Scapos) and Paul Carpenter (BSC) and Gabriel Antoniu (Inria)
I/O & Storage – Sai Narasimhamurthy (Seagate) and André Brinkman (Universität Mainz – JGU)
Mathematics & Algorithms – Dirk Pleiter (Julich SC) and Adrian Tate (Cray)
Centre-to-Edge Framework – Jens Krueger (Fraunhofer) and Hans-Christian Hoppe (Intel)
Application co-design - Erwin Laure (KTH) and Andreas Wierse (SICOS)

The full list of experts who contributed to SRA4 is here.

In addition, we introduced a number of ‘horizontal’ Research Clusters, addressing the most important research challenges for Work Programmes 2021-2022 and beyond. The final set of Clusters was selected based on technical contents as well as on relevance according to the following parameters:

Relevance & Impact (why do this?) - In general, why is this Cluster’s contribution important for the future work programmes?
Maturity (time to market) - How long will it take approximately for the technology, features and functions addressed by the cluster to turn into commercially available products or services?
Hurdles to overcome - What are the main R&D hurdles presented by the Cluster? These could be of e.g. technological, skills, infrastructure, financial investment, risk or legal nature.
Driving competencies in Europe - Where are the competences necessary for a successful execution of the R&D associated with the Cluster? In Europe and outside of Europe?
Cost of research to achieve significant uptake - What financial investment is necessary to produce commercially usable results?

This is the current SRA 4 Model: