The global race to Exascale computing but the worlds governments recieved a boost last week, when the European Union released a statement on it's current approach.

The European Union said last week that it would double it's investment in it's push for Exascale computing, according to an article in ComputerWorld. This would bring the funding to EURO1.2B from the original EURO630 million.

This level of funding now puts the US effort into the shade. Lsat year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) asked for $91 million, but only received $73 million.

An exascale system will be able to reach 1 quintillion (or 1 million trillion) floating point operations per second.

Of course, the dark horse here is China, who is investing huge amounts of money and talent in the race for faster systems. They're current 5 year plan (2011 - 2015) has a budget of approx. £405 million. Having to started to create their own processors (Loogson), they certainly have the expertise and drive to perform.

Source : Article

Source : China's Plan for Exascale Computing