Brussels continues to try and up its tech game so that it can compete with Asia and the United States, whether that be through big investments in quantum computing research or sweet tax perks aimed at luring big microchip producers to Europe.
This week, the EU’s high-performance computing division announced that sites have been chosen for the next generation of supercomputers. The jewel in the crown will be an exascale-level device known as JUPITER, which will be built at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in north-west Germany.
Once up and running in 2023, JUPITER will be capable of performing more than 1 quintillion arithmetic calculations every second, which will place it third in the global ranking, ahead of LUMI, a pre-exascale unit in Finland that is currently Europe’s most powerful.
According to official data for June 2022, Japan’s ‘Fugaku’ and the United States’ IBM-built ‘Summit’ systems are the top two most powerful supercomputers. ‘Frontier’...