Intel Corp. on Tuesday announced that it has formed a new business unit to better address new opportunities in working with the U.S. government.

The new Intel Federal LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the world's largest computer chip maker and will have offices in Oregon, California and the Washington D.C. area.

Intel said the new unit will initially focus on the high performance computing segment, including work on exascale computing with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and other agencies.

Exascale computers can perform one million trillion calculations per second, more than one hundred times faster than the fastest supercomputer currently operational.

It is predicted that DOE's first exascale supercomputer for scientific research will appear around 2018.

"Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government," Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said in a statement.

"The creation of Intel Federal demonstrates the strategic importance of these programs and will give us the ability to establish and maintain the unique processes, procedures and controls needed to develop and manage programs with the government, " he noted.

Over time the new unit will expand its focus to a wide variety of other programs within the U.S. government, Intel said.