SCIENCE

The Wissenschaftsrat, the German Science Council, an agency of the federal government, has recommended that three supercomputers of the highest performance be created in Europe; one of them to be located in Germany. On the current list of the Top500, there are 128 supercomputers in European countries. In the recommendation by the Council, which extends to about 40 pages, the Council gives an overview of the currently available supercomputing capacities, the resources required by the most varied scientific disciplines and the steps already being undertaken to expand capacities and resources. When in 2005 Germany´s most powerful supercomputer with a peak performance of 40 Teraflop/s will have been installed at the Leibniz Computing Centre Munich (LRZ), a supercomputer capable of nine times the machine´s performance will have gone online in the United States, the Council´s recommendation points out. To allow Europe to compete scientifically in future with the US and Japan and in light of recent developments also with China, it was essential that the supply of computing resources be expanded continuously in both quantitative and qualitative terms. In the spring of 2005 the performance of the at present most powerful European supercomputer in Barcelona is also to be enhanced from a current 31 to 40 Teraflop/s. The Science Council recommends that computers of the highest performance class be created in future by combining national resources at the European level. On account of the five-to-six-year life time of a supercomputer the creation of three European peak-performing machines of this sort made sense, the Council declared. In the event that attempts to situate one such European supercomputer in Germany proved to be successful, the federal government and the German federal states could be expected to face costs of up to 30 to 50 million euros, the Council observed.