The European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI) is formed with the goal of building a European vision and roadmap to address the challenge of the new generation of massively parallel systems composed of millions of heterogeneous cores which will provide Petaflop performances in 2010 and Exaflop performances in 2020.

From their web site, the initiative is co-funded by the European Commission is to build a european vision and roadmap to address the challenges of the new generation of massively parallel systems composed of millions of heterogeneous cores which will provide Petaflop performances in 2010 and Exaflop performances in 2020 (the speed of a supercomputer is measured in “FLOPS” (FLoating Point Operations Per Second)), “Petascale” supercomputers can process one quadrillion (10¹⁵) (1000 trillion) FLOPS, Exascale is computing performance is one quintillion (10¹⁸) FLOPS (one million teraflops).

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion). A particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, are problems whose full solution requires semi-infinite computing resources.

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