Ed’s note: Europe’s newest big bad supercomputer

Its name is Discoverer and it ‘lives’ in the Sofia Tech Park, in Bulgaria. This newest addition to the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, the supercomputer Discoverer, will be capable of more than 4.5 petaflops (or 4.5 million billion calculations per second) of processing power. Why is that of interest to us? Because it will help boost research in the European Union in many areas including energy, of course.

Discoverer is the third supercomputer inaugurated by the European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) Joint Undertaking this year. It has previously inaugurated two other petascale supercomputers: MeluXina, in Luxembourg and Vega, in Slovenia. Four more supercomputers are underway: Karolina, in the Czech Republic, Deucalion in Portugal, Lumi in Finland, and Leonardo in Italy.

As commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Mariya Gabriel, has said during the inauguration of the Discoverer in Bulgaria last week, “This new supercomputer will aid European users in driving research and innovation, regardless of where they are located in Europe”.