The European Commission last week said it is doubling its investment in the push for exascale computing from [Euro]630 million to [Euro]1.2 billion (or the equivalent of $1.58 billion).

The Europeans announced the plan the same week the White House released its fiscal year 2013 budget, which envisions a third year of anemic funding to develop exascale technologies.

Meanwhile, China is moving ahead with its own plans and has the financial resources and human talent to make progress in exascale computing. The Europeans may be particularly worried about China.

The Europeans, as do the Chinese, see opportunity in the push for exascale. An exascale system will be able to reach 1 quintillion (or 1 million trillion) floating point operations per second, 100 times more powerful than Japan’s K Computer, the current fastest supercomputer.

But exascale systems “pose numerous hard challenges,” said the European Commission (EC), which include 100-fold reduction in energy consumption along with development of new programming models. As Europe sees it, solving these challenges creates opportunity for Europe, China and others looking to take on U.S. HPC dominance.

In the U.S., there has been restlessness in the HPC community about the lack of a multi-year plan by the government to fund exascale research and development.