(Telecompaper) The European Commission has announced that it will invest EUR 140 million to fund a series of newly launched projects and centres of excellence in the field of supercomputing, or HPC (High Performance Computing). The funding is part of the Horizon 2020 programme to achieve world-class, extreme scale computing capabilities and will be used to address challenges such as increasing the energy efficiency of HPC systems or making it easier to program and run applications on these complex machines. As part of the HPC push, the EC is helping to fund eight new Centres of Excellence on supercomputing applications and codes.