Europe Outspends U.S. on Exascale Computing

Computerworld: In the race to build an exascale computing system–one capable of 1,000 trillion floating point calculations per second–Europe and China are spending far more than the U.S. The EU has announced that this year it will double the amount it spends on the effort to about $1.6 trillion. And experts believe China has even more funding. Meanwhile the U.S. Department of Energy requested $91 million for exascale computing projects and received $73.4 million for the fiscal 2012 budget. IDC analyst Earl Joseph called that level of funding “peanuts.”

Exascale computers will be approximately 1,000 times faster than today’s supercomputers.