Supercomputer aims to simulate the entire world

The project is called Living Earth Simulator, and forms part of a huge EU research initiative named FuturIcT. It will unite various existing projects and expand upon them.

For example, ETH Zurich is simulating the travel activities of all 7.5 million inhabitants of Switzerland to forecast and cope with traffic congestion.

Other researchers are mining huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as the internet..