The center is Intel's first joint lab in Europe focused exclusively on "exascale" computers that are able to process 1 trillion instructions per second. It will be part of Intel Labs Europe and will be supported by Intel with a multi-million Euro investment over a 3-year period.

The French Atomic Energy Commission, the Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University and the French National High-Performance Computing Agency will combine to match Intel's contribution.

"France has taken a leading role in driving high-performance computing research in Europe," said Steve Pawlowski, Intel senior fellow and general manager of Intel Architecture Group's central architecture and planning, in a statement. "We chose to work with these three organizations because of their world-class software competency in exascale and high- performance computing."

The Exascale Computing Research Center will integrate multi petaFLOPS systems, develop advanced performance optimization techniques, and collaborate with end users to optimize supercomputer performance in areas such as energy, seismology, computational fluid dynamics and health care.

The lab will employ about a dozen people initially and is expected to eventually grow to about three times that number.

Intel Labs Europe was formally established in early 2009 and today consists of 19 labs employing more than 900 research professionals.