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Switzerland unveils new supercomputer

Swiss economics minister Guy Parmelin
Parmelin unveiled the new supercomputer, the world's sixth-fastest, in Lugano. Keystone-SDA

Switzerland has a new supercomputer. The machine, named "Alps", was officially unveiled by Economics Minister Guy Parmelin at the National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano on Saturday. It is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The supercomputer is used, for example, for weather forecasts by the Federal Office of Meteorology, MeteoSwiss. It will also perform calculations for climatology and in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

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To carry out the calculations that Alps can do in a day, a standard laptop would need 40,000 years, Michele De Lorenzi, Deputy Director and Head of Communications at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), explained to the Keystone-SDA news agency.

+ Swiss supercomputing chief advocates overseas relocation of data centre

In the Top 500 list of supercomputers from June, the high-performance computer was ranked sixth in the world. In the future, it could be even higher in the world rankings, as it had not yet been completed in June.

Translated from German by DeepL/gw

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