Slovenia's Vega supercomputer is set to go live next month after Atos completed the system this week.

The 6.9 petaflops Vega is the first new supercomputer part-funded under the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. The EU put in half of the €17.2m ($20m) investment, while the Institute of Information Science in Maribor Slovenia (IZUM) gave the rest.

EU plans to invest heavily in supercomputers

Vega supercomputer
– EU

“I am delighted that we have reached this milestone with our Slovenian partners," EuroHPC JU executive director Anders Dam Jensen said.

"The first EuroHPC petascale computer is now built, we have signed the acceptance protocol and paid the last invoice. The machine has already successfully completed its benchmarks. Other tests will be performed in the coming days to fine-tune the system and connections with users. Everything is on schedule to have the first fully operational EuroHPC system in April.”

Dr. Aleš Bošnjak, director of IZUM, added: “The Vega supercomputer will enable soon both Slovenian and other European researchers to cooperate in large international research projects and additionally accelerate the use of supercomputing capacities in Slovenia.”

Named after Slovenian mathematician Jurij Vega, the system will be used for a wide range of research purposes across Europe.

It will be followed by EuroHPC petascale systems in LuxProvide, Luxembourg; Sofiatech, Bulgaria; IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre, Czech Republic; and Minho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC), Portugal.

EuroHPC is also funding three 'pre-exascale' supercomputers at CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland; CINECA, Italy; Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Spain.