Intel must really be trying to prove its supremacy in computing, because, lately, it has been starting more and more ventures bent on building unparalleled supercomputers. After the very recent announcement that it had teamed up with NEC for the same supercomputing-advancement purpose, the Santa Clara-based enterprise now moves into Europe, specifically France, where it will set the basis for the exaflop.

Currently, the world leading supercomputer is an AMD-powered Cray XT5 conglomerate dubbed Jaguar. At its peak, the most it can produce is something around 1.75 teraflops. Although beyond anything achieved before, Intel wants to completely humble the configuration (and, naturally, Advanced Micro Devices) by creating a monster, aptly named hyper computer, capable of at least an exaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 of floating point operations per second).

Many zeros, indeed. Intel plans to put together the embodiment of this fantasy through the Exascale Computing Research Center. The center will be part of the Intel Labs organization in Europe and will focus on integrating multiple petaflop-capable systems into one, developing advanced computing-optimization methods. The center will also work with end users on how to employ these methods for better results in energy, seismology, computational fluid dynamics and health care.

"France has taken a leading role in driving high-performance computing research in Europe. We chose to work with these three organizations because of their world-class software competency in exascale and high-performance computing," Steve Pawlowski, Intel senior fellow and general manager of Intel architecture group's central architecture and planning, said.

The three French partners are Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif and Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. As the first joint lab in Europe focused solely on high-performance computing (HPC), in exchange for aiding in the establishment of the center and in the research, the world-leading CPU developer will contribute its own expertise and a multi-million-Euro, 3-year sum investment, which the three partners are expected to match.

This arrangement will complement Intel's other supercomputing ventures, such as the Intel Academic Community Program and the European Space Agency's "Mapping the Globe from Space" project. If built, the new supercomputers will be able to solve complicated medical calculations involving genomes and cellular activity, aiding in finding a cure for cancer, for instance.

The laboratory will initially employ a dozen members, but it is expected to grow to thrice that number.