In an effort for Europe to catch up to the United States regarding next-generation computing, a Franco-German collaboration said on Wednesday that it had secured a contract to supply Europe with its first Exascale supercomputer.
The consortium, comprised of Germany’s ParTec (JY0n.DE) and a subsidiary of France’s Atos (ATOS.PA), said it had reached an agreement with EuroHPC. EuroHPC is a joint effort between the European Union (EU), European governments, and European private enterprises to promote supercomputing in Europe.
Traditional computers are not nearly as powerful as supercomputers, with an exascale supercomputer able to complete one quintillion computations in one second. This is equal to one million billion billion million million million calculations.
As part of the agreement for 500 million euros ($524 million), the consortium will deliver a supercomputer to the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Germany under JUPITER.
According to the collaboration, “JUPITER will have three times the computing capability of Europe’s current most powerful supercomputer,” adding that it would occupy the space of around four tennis courts.