What used to be the sound barrier in aviation is what is known as the exascale hurdle in the computer industry: a computer that performs more than a trillion calculations within a second.

With it, the most difficult tasks and the most complex calculations can be carried out, complicated theoretical models for exploring the universe or behavior on the financial markets can be set up, new materials can be simulated, innovative medicines designed and physical problems tackled.

Stephen Finsterbusch

Editor in Business.

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Just as the American aviator legend Charles E. Yeager was the first person to break the sound barrier 75 years ago and thus set a speed record that had previously been considered impossible, engineers in the United States now also leapfrogged the gigantic computing power of 1000 trillion arithmetic operations per second.

Chinese and Japanese

The machine is a joint effort by several US high-tech companies such as the chip manufacturer AMD and the computer manufacturer HP.

It's in a research facility of the Washington Department of Energy, it's called Frontier, it's as big as several wall units placed side by side, and it cools its overheating chips with water cooling.

With its power, it heralds a new age for computers.

In addition, the Americans are once again at the top of the top 500 list of the most powerful computers, which is drawn up twice a year.

In recent years, the Chinese and Japanese in particular have set the tone with their systems.

It is no longer just a question of interconnecting thousands of processors and graphics chips as the computing brains of every computer;

it is also important to develop appropriate networks and program software that can retrieve the performance of these chip clusters.

The United States plans to build several exascale systems in the coming years.

China and Europe are joining in.

However, both Beijing and Brussels have to rely on components from American chip manufacturers, network suppliers and software companies for their systems.

As part of the so-called Euro-HPC program, 7 billion euros are available for the construction and expansion of European supercomputers towards exascale.

Because of the US sanctions against China that have been in effect since 2021, which prohibit American companies from supplying products made from key technologies to China, Beijing is no longer announcing any new supercomputer systems.

Experts believe the country has at least one exascale system that could match or even surpass the performance of America's Frontier machine.

The worldwide market for supercomputers is currently valued at 36 billion dollars.

By 2027 it is expected to be close to $50 billion.