NEW YORK: The USA Department of Energy said that they are going to create two new computers which are the fastest supercomputers for research into basic science as well as nuclear weapons. DOE is spending US$425mil for this.
The DOE is awarding US$325mil (RM1bil) to build Summit for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Sierra at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
An additional US$100mil (RM334mil) will go to research into “extreme scale supercomputing” technology as part of a program called FastForward2, the DOE said in a news release.
The supercomputers, made with components from IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox, will run five to seven times faster than the United States’ current fastest computers.
Summit and Sierra will operate at 150 petaflops and 100 petaflops, respectively, compared to the world’s current top super-computer, the Tianhe-2 in China, which performs at 55 petaflops, Nvidia said in a separate news release.
IBM built the first supercomputer to reach one petaflop, a precise measure of how fast computers calculate, in 2008, also for the Department of Energy.
Researchers worldwide will be able to apply for time to use the Summit computer. The National Nuclear Security Administration will use Sierra “to ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear deterrent without testing,” Nvidia said.
Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia is best-known for its high-end personal-computer graphics chips favoured by gamers. In recent years it has developed more advanced versions of those chips suitable for parallel processing on supercomputers and in datacentres.
It has also been working with IBM to develop future chip offerings for high-end
