ZURICH. The federal government has approved a major expansion of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, authorising a next-generation system that will place Switzerland among the top tier of European computing powers. The investment, reported at around 350 million francs, covers the machine itself and the electrical infrastructure to feed it.
The new system, which will succeed the current Alps machine, is designed to deliver performance measured in exaflops, meaning a billion billion calculations per second. For scale, such a machine completes in one second what a billion people with calculators would need decades to finish.
The architecture continues the centre's bet on graphics processing units, the chips originally built for video games that now dominate scientific computing and artificial intelligence. Tens of thousands of processors will be linked by a network fast enough that the whole machine can behave as a single computer, and waste heat will be recovered to warm nearby buildings, as the centre already does.
The expansion matters beyond Switzerland's borders because computing time on such machines is now the limiting resource in fields from climate modelling to drug design. European researchers compete for allocations, and a larger Swiss machine strengthens the continent's capacity at a moment when access to American and Chinese systems carries growing political uncertainty.
CSCS, which is operated by ETH Zurich, has hosted the national supercomputing service since 1991 and was an early adopter of GPU-based systems in Europe. The expansion is funded by the federal government with contributions from ETH Zurich, and the machine will be procured through the same partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise that produced Alps.
The centre's most visible customer is MeteoSwiss, which runs the national weather forecast on the machine at a resolution fine enough to resolve individual thunderstorm cells over the Alps. Climate researchers use the same hardware to simulate European weather a century ahead, work that feeds directly into the federal adaptation strategy for heat, floods and water scarcity.
The limits are physical rather than conceptual. An exascale machine draws tens of megawatts, roughly the consumption of a small town, and Lugano's electricity supply and cooling water required reinforcement before the machine could even be ordered. Critics also note that hardware alone does not produce science; the centre must recruit specialists to help researchers rewrite their software for the new architecture. The procurement contract therefore includes funding for a dedicated software engineering team.
“The machine is the easy part,” said the centre's director. “The hard part is the thousand research groups who must learn to keep it busy.”
The route from procurement to application is already mapped. Priority access has been promised to climate simulations at kilometre-scale resolution, to the Swiss AI initiative training open language models, and to materials research for fusion energy, each of which has outgrown the present machine.
Installation is planned in stages beginning in 2027, with the full system expected in service by 2028. The existing Alps machine will remain in operation during the transition, and its processors will eventually be redistributed to university computing centres. Nothing usable will be scrapped, a point the centre makes whenever the price tag is debated in parliament.
The decision keeps Switzerland inside a small club. Only the United States, Japan, China and a European consortium currently field exascale-class machines, and the Lugano system will be engineered to slot into the European network of supercomputing centres that share allocations across borders.
For Ticino, the expansion cements an improbable status: a canton of lakes and chestnut woods that also houses one of the most demanding electrical installations in Europe. The mountain above the centre has absorbed the hum of machines for 30 years, and it is about to get louder.