The Exascale Research Initiative, of Cray Incorporated, will initially involve with collaborations in Switzerland and Scotland, a statement from Cray said.

For starters, Cray said it will assemble one team of researchers at the supercomputing center of Exascale Technology Centre at the University of Edinburgh, and another team at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.

Both centres will work with the European software partners of Cray, like Allinea Software Limited.

According to Peter Ungaro, chief executive of Cray Incorporated, there have been scientific breakthroughs in vital areas like global climate change and new energy sources, which are waiting to use exascale. Cray, he added, is “working hard” to build next-generation supercomputers that are capable of exascale-performance.

Cray’s Swiss partnership will be under the banner of the ‘HP2C program’ that is aimed at exploring large-scale simulation applications.

It may be noted that Cray Incorporated was the second computer manufacturer to have broken the petaflops-performance barrier by using processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

The Roadrunner system of IBM was the first to break the petaflops-performance barrier, in May 2008, also using chips made by AMD.

One month ago, Intel Corporation had announced that it will set up an exascale research centre along with partners in Europe.