In mid-June members of the Information and Communication Technologies component of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) discussed plans in the works to add a focus area for exascale technologies to their research program.

In a presentation given in Brussels on June 11 Leonardo Flores Añover (Scientific Officer, GEANT and e-Infrastructures Unit) outlined the proposed exascale objectives in FP7, which are still in discussion. If adopted this would mark the first objective in FP7 aimed at the exascale, complementing other EU-funded efforts such as PRACE and support for the International Exascale Software Project.

Discussions right now indicate that the effort may include both hardware and software components. On the hardware side the goal would be to develop a small number of 100 PFLOPS computing platforms by 2014 that could reach exaFLOPS by 2020. On the software side research would include both applications and systems software. A notional 40/60 split is being proposed in applications and simulation vs. systems development.