The decision to construct the supercomputer, which will be the most powerful in Europe, is the result of a deal between the government and the Spanish branch of computer giant IBM.

The system will be at the heart of a planned national supercomputer centre for scientific research on medicine, climate change, and new materials for aeronautics and mechanical engineering.

"Catalonia is the ideal location for the national supercomputer centre," said Science and Technology Minister Juan Costa, adding that the northeastern Spanish region, which borders France, has a large scientific community.

Spain also proposed Catalonia -- albeit unsuccessfully -- as the site for a planned 10-billion-dollar nuclear fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, financed by the European Union, Russia, China, the United States, South Korea and Japan.

The Spanish supercomputer will be a 40-teraflop machine, meaning it is capable of carrying out 40 trillion floating-point operations per second.

The 60-tonne system will comprise 4,500 processors, have a storage capacity of 128 terabytes and use the Linux operating system, the government said.

The world's biggest supercomputer is the 40-teraflop Earth Simulator built by NEC in Yokohama, Japan. It has 5,104 processors and is dedicated to studies of climate and seismic activity.

SPACE.WIRE