CHIPMAKER Intel has gone all Flemish and opened its Flanders Exascience Lab at the IMEC research facilities in Leuven, Belgium.

Belgium is a good place to study chips as it was the country that invented French Fries. However apparently Chipzilla's lab will develop software to run on Intel-based future exascale computer systems.

Exascale machines can deliver 1,000 times the performance of today's fastest supercomputers, using up to 1 million cores and 1 billion processes.

Currently the worlds fastest supercomputers operate at speeds measured in petaflops, where a petaflops refers to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Thus a supercomputer that runs at exascale speed will be able to process a quintillion such instructions per second. A quintillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.

If it manages any big breakthroughs exascale computing could lead to simulating complex systems like the human body, the Earth's climate and the female mind.

It could result in finding cures for diseases or predicting natural disasters such as Gordon Brown.

Intel's Flanders Exascience Lab will be focused at enabling scientific uses such as space weather, the electromagnetic activity in the space surrounding Earth's atmosphere. µ