A French-German consortium said it had signed an agreement to provide the first “exascale” supercomputer in Europe, as the continent seeks to catch up with the United States in the next generation of computing.
The Al-Rai daily has learned the consortium includes the German company Bartec and a unit of the French company Atos.
The consortium said the agreement has been concluded with EuroHBC, which is a joint project between the European Union, European countries and private companies that aims to promote supercomputing in Europe.
Supercomputers are much more powerful than conventional ones, and an exascale computer can perform a quintillion, or a million trillion (one with 18 zeros to its right), calculations per second.
Under the deal, worth 500 million Euros ($524 million), the consortium will provide a supercomputer named Jupiter to the German Jülich Supercomputing Center.
“Jupiter will have a computing capacity three times the most powerful supercomputer in Europe today,” the consortium confirmed, adding that the matter would require an area equivalent to about four tennis courts.