Supercomputers are a crucial research tool for medicine, aviation, robots and weapons, but there are only three dominant players: The US, Japan and China. Europe has had enough of that situation, however, and announced plans to spend up to $1.2 billion to develop its own technology. The aim is to develop its own exascale machines (that can do a billion billion calculations per second) by 2022-23. "It is a tough race and today the EU is lagging behind," said EC comissioner Andrus Ansip.
To give you an idea of how far behind, China has the world's fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, with 93 petaflops (93 million billion floating point operations per second) of computing power. The nation is also working on the Tianhe-3 (below), the world's first exascale machine with over ten times the power of TaihuLight, and expects to have that up and running by 2020.
Other top ten machines are located in Japan, US and everywhere but Europe (other than Switzerland, which is not part of the EU but an "associated country.") The only large European player is Atos SE, which built the Bull Sequana shown above. The machine, 55th in global supercomputer rankings, is the first phase of a 25-petaflop computer that will be used by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.
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