The European Union (EU) is pledging 1 billion euros over 10 years on a set of advanced computer technologies, including a supercomputing network designed to forecast social and economic events, in particular, crisis events.

The supercomputing side of the effort has been given the grand title of the Living Earth Simulator (LES). The LES is part of the FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator Project, which also encompasses a global sensor network Planetary Nervous System) and a framework for individuals and organizations to share data (Global Participatory Platform). The LES system will gather information from the sensor network, Twitter, web news searches, and a wide variety of other real-time sources, and try and tease out higher level societal trends.

The system could also be used to identify political unrest, the spread of epidemics, economic bubbles, and other types of systematic instabilities. About 30 computer science centers around the world have pledged support for the project.