ATHENS – Renowned for the skill of its high-tech sector – but panned for having slow Internet – Greece is one of five locations to be the site of the next generation of European supercomputers aimed at improving the human condition.

That, said Kathimerini, was announced by the European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) Joint Undertaking for the first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER, at its Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany.

Exascale computers are supercomputers capable of over a billion billion calculations per second.

“This capability represents a major technological milestone for the European Union, and greatly promotes European scientific excellence,” the European Commission said. JUPITER will benefit complementary technologies, such as quantum computing, digital twins, and big data, and be jointly financed by Germany and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

The other four sites that were selected to host supercomputers with petascale or pre-exascale capabilities are the National Infrastructures for Research and Technology in Greece, the Governmental Agency for IT Development in Hungary, the National University of Ireland (Galway) and the Academic Computer Center in Poland, the paper said.

The super computers will be used for a range of applications, including speeding research for new drugs, medical advances, wind-farm design modeling and biomolecular research.