In order for the European scientific communities to fully benefit from the performance of leadership-class Tier-0 systems provided by the PRACE 2 Hosting Members, it is mandatory to provide them support through high-level teams in terms of code enabling and optimization of scientific applications. Each team will be located at an Hosting Member Tier-0 site and will be composed of HPC experts having, on the one hand, strong skills both on specific HPC architectures provided by the Hosting Members as well as applied mathematics, computer science and management of data, and on the other hand are experienced in the fields of applications they support.

Coordinated together, the HLST teams will establish a distributed European task force, able to reach the needed critical mass. In relation with the PRACE SSC and complementing the work done by the European Centres of Excellence, these teams, by providing specific skills in different domain science, could work on transverse actions including the extreme scalability of selected European scientific applications and tools towards Exascale, Data Analytics, and Machine Learning as well as the industrialisation and the long-term support/dissemination across PRACE RI of scientific applications.