The European Union needs 20,000 GPUs to build a machine that fully simulates the Earth's digital twin. Line up at the end of the queue. However, the GTX 1660 Super cost $800.

Sadly, Destination Earth (called DestinE by the cool kids) will not be the world's most detailed MMO, nor will it be a digital live service version of "The Amazing Race," but rather "to monitor and simulate natural and human activity It will be "a high-precision digital model of the Earth for monitoring and simulating natural and human activity. [A complete GPU-intensive simulation is the ultimate goal of the project, which will bring together multiple "digital twins" of the Earth, each model simulating a different part of the Earth's system. Weather forecasting and climate change, food and water security, global ocean circulation, and ocean biogeochemistry are examples proposed by the scientists running this project

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Rather ominously, the project is also being "used on a global scale to accelerate the green transition and plan for massive environmental degradation and disasters." Sadly, they are inevitable. [DestinE Simulation's plan is to provide data to the EU's efforts to go carbon neutral by 2050 to inform future environmental strategies. This is all part of a $1.2 billion (€1 billion) investment in green technology in the EU bloc.

In addition to standard modeling, users can create different scenarios to see what would happen if certain parameters were changed both in the short and long term. According to the European Commission, DestinE will initially be offered only to public institutions, but will eventually be opened to the broader scientific and industrial communities.

And it is estimated that it will require at least four times the computing power of the supercomputer Cray Piz Daint, currently in Zurich, to accurately model all the information as scientists require. This is a machine with more than 5,000 Pascal-powered Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs, and to manage such a detailed Earth simulation, scientists would need about 20,000 graphics chips in the final supercomputer which means.

And this is definitely for science, not a clever ploy by the EU to build humanity's largest Ethereum mining rig. Absolutely not.

As anyone who has been paying attention to cryptocurrency mining attempts knows, this kind of setup requires a lot of power. If built in a location that uses so-called "dirty" power, the simulation itself will emit large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere just to operate. In order to avoid the problems that its own computing power is trying to solve, it would need to be located in a place where renewable energy is plentiful.

Thankfully, the EU's hoarding of some 20,000 GPUs will not happen anytime soon. The plan is for the 7- to 10-year project to start this year with a small core platform, followed by a cloud-based platform and the first two digital twins in 2023.

Still, fingers crossed that the chip procurement goes well.