A machine at China’s National University of Defense Technology in Guangzhou, called Tianhe-2 (‘Milky Way-2) is thought to now be the fastest supercomputer in existence – variously reported as doing either 34 or 55 petaflops.
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President Obama has ordered the development of a supercomputer that is some 20 times faster than the world’s current record-holder and is expected to go online by 2025.
The executive order, issued by Obama on Wednesday, would set up a body known as the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) to research and build what is hoped to become the first machine to hit 1 exaflop, equivalent to 1,000 petaflops. Dubbed the National Strategic Computing Initiative, ultimately this will be a computer that is capable of mimicking the human brain, which apparently isn’t possible with today’s technology. It aims to create systems that can apply exaflops of computing power to exabytes of data, keep the US at the forefront of HPC computing and improve HPC application developer productivity.
To give you an idea of how fast that is, an exascale system would be capable of performing 1 million trillion floating-point operations per second. “This coordinated research, development, and deployment strategy will draw on the strengths of departments and agencies to move the Federal government into a position that sharpens, develops, and streamlines a wide range of new 21st century applications”.
“To some degree it depends on how much money a country is willing to spend”.
The US president is clearly looking to his legacy of his time in office, and he believes that high-performance computing is needed if the United States is to retain its economic growth, which will increasingly rely on high performance next-generation computers.
Evan Vucci-AP U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a speech to the African Union on July 28, 2015, in Addis Ababa.
There was no timeline provided as to when this project will be completed, although the executive order did state that NSCI must be setup within 90 days of today and must release annual reports about its progress.
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“By strategically investing now, we can prepare for increasing computing demands and emerging technological challenges, building the foundation for sustained US leadership for decades to come, while also expanding the role of HPC to address the pressing challenges faced across many sectors”, the blog added.
