SHIFT2RAIL is a joint technical initiative that will handle all railway research within Horizon 2020. The founding members are Trafikverket, Network Rail, Bombardier, Alstom, Siemens, Ansaldo STS, CAF and Thales, together with the European Commission. The total budget for the program during 2015-2024 is about 800 million €. Shift2Rail has five main innovation programs that can briefly be described as development of vehicles, signal systems, infrastructure, information systems and freight traffic. The overall ambitious targets are to double the capacity of the European rail system, and increase its reliability and service quality by 50%, all while halving the lifecycle costs.

The next generation of supercomputers must be capable of a billion billion calculations per second. These are referred to as Exascale computers and with this ability to undertake such volume of calculations, they will transform our understanding of the world through advanced simulation and problem solving. It will take ten million processors working together to achieve Exascale; so how can this be achieved?