PRACE prepares the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, consisting of several Tier-0 centres providing European researchers with access to capability computers and forming the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. PRACE Principal Partners are those PRACE partners which are willing to host and fund one of the Tier-0 centres.

"CINECA is very proud to announce that Italy has confirmed willingness to play an important role in European scenario of computational sciences. The participation of CINECA to the PRACE Principal Partners, under the sponsorship of the Italian Ministry of Research, represents a great opportunity to maintain and promote CINECA as one of the major supercomputing centres available in Europe. CINECA is highly interested in the objectives of PRACE and strongly wants to collaborate with the other high performance centers involved in PRACE to reach important goals at European level", stated Sanzio Bassini, Director of Systems and Technologies Department at CINECA.