Current petascale initiatives are described and future projects looking at exascale development considered. The goal is to understand Europe’s current position in the international HPC landscape, especially our strengths and weaknesses.
Report is available here

The main findings of the report follow.
 

• In 2011, Japan reclaimed top ranking on latest list of world’s supercomputers. The “K Computer” installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe is No 1 on TOP500 list with 8.77 PFLOPS performance.
• Asia has been investing heavily in supercomputing technology and now hoststhe two fastest supercomputers and four of the five fastest. Dominant countries in Asia are Japan and China.
• However following significant investment over the last few years, the US is still dominant in the supercomputing sector, with five systems performing at the petaflop level and with two 20 PFLOPS systems anticipated by 2012.
• To date, the US has led much of the discussion around exascale computing, investing in the International Exascale Software Project (IESP) and funding programmes such as the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing program.
• China, whose Tianhe-1A supercomputer was ranked No1 in the TOP500 November 2010 edition remains the fastest rising country in the region, and even in the world with increasing number of systems listed in TOP500.China has invested heavily in supercomputing technology and now holds second position in the TOP500 list. The Chinese government has actively promoted independent innovation to avoid reliance on foreign technology.
• Although China’s recent top-end systems are impressive, it is notable that the peak performance / sustained performance ratio is high, leading to questions over how applicable these systems are.
• Europe has now two petascale systems, one in France, and one in Germany. The most powerful system in Europe is a Bull system installed at the French CEA, with a peak performance of 1.254 PFLOPS (No 9).
• The European share of systems listed in the TOP500 (125 systems) is still larger than the Asian share (103 systems).  Germany, UK, and France are almost equal with 30, 27, and 25 systems respectively. 
• BULL is Europe’s major European HPC manufacturer. BULL has delivered in 2010 one Petascale system to CEA DAM, and will deliver two others in 2011, one to GENCI and one to the fusion community (IFERC) in Japan. EUROTECH has also been involved in the design and manufacture of special purpose supercomputers (APE, Janus, QPACE). However up to now, Europe has not sought to develop its own “domestic technologies” such as in Asia. Europe has focussed on demonstrating expertise in software development and has recently seen a series of public-private partnerships between European research centres and international HPC producers to address the challenges associated with exascale.
• Significant funding has been made available in Europe through the Framework 7 programme, both in petascale (e.g. PRACE) and exascale terms (e.g.the current Exascale computing, software and simulation call).
• The recent G8 Research Councils Initiative on exascale applications for global issues is significant as it provides funding to enable collaboration between US and European partners and that it focuses on the applications of exascale rather than hardware.
• Most exascale initiatives across the continents identify a similar set of global issues as scientific drivers for exascale computing. These include climate change, sustainable energy sources and nanotechnology.