The US still has more computers on the TOP500 list than any other country in the world, but researchers have anxious for years about falling behind China. But if President Obama gets his way, that will change. The most powerful supercomputers now in development in the US are the twin Summit and Sierra supercomputers, built by IBM for the Department of Energy and expected to handle 100 petaflops each when completed in 2017.
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It would be capable of making one quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second – a figure which is known as one exaflop. Still, having the brunt of presidential authority behind it is important, in part because it keeps supercomputing in the limelight-something that has been easier with increased buzz about the closer competitive quarters with other nations who also see HPC as a strategic economic asset. That’s 30 times faster than anything that is available today.
While there is no definitive timeline for the NSCI to pull an exascale computer out of the hat, the group’s council is required to submit a plan for the development of exascale computers within 90 days of the order being issued and check-in with updates annually.
Evan Vucci-AP U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a speech to the African Union on July 28, 2015, in Addis Ababa.
Fuck what you heard about supercomputers, especially whatever trash they have over in Europe. NSCI’s first task, according to the White House, is to whip up a computer 20 times more powerful than China’s Tianhe-2-currently the leading supercomputer in the world. The DoD will focus on data analytics computing.
“By combining the computing power and the data capacity of these two classes of HPC systems, deeper insights can be gained through new approaches that combine simulation with actual data…Achieving this combination will require finding a convergence between the hardware and software technology for these two classes of systems.”
President Obama has released an executive order to encourage the growth of high-performance computing research, development and deployment.
But supercomputing comes with its own set of challenges, including how efficiently they operate. A recent study commissioned by NASA determined that machines able to sustain exaflop-level performance could incorporate full modeling of turbulence, as well as more dynamic flight conditions, in their simulations.
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Even with the challenges posed by the end of Moore’s Law, developing the exascale super computer is still largely achievable with the science we know now, Binkley said. Help will also be provided by IARPA and NIST, or the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
