Europe’s fastest supercomputer was set to be unveiled on Friday in Munich. Its three petaflops of processing power will be used to explore new worlds, from the wonders of the cosmos to mysteries of the earth’s core.

The phenomenal processing power is equivalent to three billion people each holding a pocket calculator, each completing one million calculations every second.

This is how IBM likes to represent the performance of their newest supercomputer, which at its three petaflop peak performance (FLOP – Floating Operations Per Second) is the fourth fastest in the world.

Physicists, geophysicists, astronomers, mathematicians, human biologists, engineers and climate researchers from 24 European countries – plus Israel and Turkey – have been promised access to the German supercomputer at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University.

It can be used to model processes as diverse as blood flow, movements in the earth’s core, or even the big bang itself.

SuperMUC, which weighs more than 100 tonnes and has the processing power of more than 110,000 PCs.