French-German Consortium Agrees to Supply Europe's First Exascale Supercomputer

Exascale can perform one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. (photo: twitter @doescience)

JAKARTA - A French-German consortium has announced a landmark agreement to supply Europe's first Exascale supercomputer. This deal worth 500 million euros (Rp. 8.2 trillion) involves the German company, ParTec, and a unit of the French company, Atos.

The consortium has an agreement with EuroHPC, a joint venture between the European Union, European countries and private companies aimed at promoting the development of supercomputers in Europe.

Supercomputers are much more powerful than conventional computers, and an Exascale supercomputer can perform one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.

This supercomputer, named JUPITER, will be provided to the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany. The consortium states that JUPITER will have three times the computing capability of Europe's most powerful supercomputer today, and will require the space of about four tennis courts.

This is an important step in Europe's efforts to catch up with the United States in next-generation computing.

It is hoped that this Exascale supercomputer will support high-level scientific and technological research and help encourage innovation in various fields.