alt Hacker NewsHPC will always be years away.
There is a big structural problem in Europe with these sort of initiatives: people receive grants for attacking identified problems; if you actually solve the problem then you have to find a new problem for your next grant, so it's best to not actually solve the problem but claim your next proposal will.
Combine that by not actually wanting to reward people properly when problems are solved and you have the root of why eurotech has totally stagnated.
I would turn it differently. The grants are awarded but they come with requirements that are impossible to satisfy without severely degrading the quality of the product.
1. Most grants are one-off before the EU moves onto new fields of grants. Therefore, there is no way to build a deep expertise in a field for one particular center.
2. Most procurement are very top-down 1990s manner. This is no way to build infrastructure (by mandate). You need to fund competing proposals and then select good things from each of them. Instead, EU has this propensity to award only one single grant, which means every single big org that will be affected by this grant is on the proposal (probably), which then means that there is no room for opinionated stuff.
3. Most EuroHPC funding is national co-funding based, which means same proposal needs to be submitted 1 + x times where x is the number of countries in the proposal. Due to requirements of EuroHPC, x > 3. So, 4 proposals, 4 negotiation for any single idea. It is such a mess.
This in addition to bureaucracy where there is no dynamism in contract negotiations. There is no flexibility in rules. The EuroHPC and every single govt would be okay with projects failing rather than allowing for a small monetary rule change which allows the project to succeed. (This is not even about getting more money but transferring money from one bucket to another in the same project).
I can go on, but these are structural problems why HPC in Europe stagnates every day.