DOE awards $62.5M to accelerate development of exascale supercomputers
07 August 2012
Under an initiative called FastForward, the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have awarded $62.5 million in research and development (R&D) contracts to five leading companies in high performance computing to accelerate the development of next-generation exascale supercomputers critical for national defense, scientific research, energy security, and economic competitiveness.
AMD, IBM, Intel, Nvidia and Whamcloud received awards to advance “extreme scale” computing technology with the goal of funding innovative R&D of critical technologies needed to deliver next generation capabilities within a reasonable energy footprint. DOE missions require exascale systems that operate at quintillions of floating point operations per second. (Earlier post.)
Such systems would be 1,000 times faster than a 1-petaflop (quadrillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer. Currently, the world’s fastest supercomputer—the IBM BlueGene/Q Sequoia system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)—clocks in at 16.3 petaflops.
The challenge is to deliver 1,000 times the performance of today’s computers with only a fraction more of the system’s energy consumption and space requirements.
—William Harrod, division director of research in DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program
Contract awards were in three high performance computing (HPC) technology areas: processors, memory, and storage and input/output (I/O).
The FastForward program, funded by DOE’s Office of Science and NNSA, is managed by LLNL on behalf of seven national laboratories including: Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Argonne and Pacific Northwest. Technical experts from the participating national laboratories evaluated and helped select the proposals and will work with selected vendors on co-design.
The FastForward initiative is intended to speed up and influence the development of technologies companies are pursuing for commercialization to ensure these products include features DOE Science and NNSA laboratories require for research.
Recognizing that the broader computing market will drive innovation in a direction that may not meet DOE mission needs in national security and science, we need to ensure that exascale systems will meet the extreme requirements in computation, data movement and reliability that DOE applications require.
—William Harrod
Under the contract awards, AMD is working on processors and memory for extreme systems, IBM also is working on memory for extreme systems, Intel Federal is working on energy efficient processors and memory architectures, Nvidia is working on processor architecture for exascale computing at low power and Whamcloud is leading a group working on storage and I/O.
In an era of increasing global competition in HPC, the development of exascale computing capabilities is widely seen as a key to sustaining the innovation edge in the science and technology that underpin national and economic security.
The world has no shortage of super computers, at least not as much as for EV batteries. Yhat $$$ could be better used to develop improved EV batteries.
Posted by: HarveyD | 07 August 2012 at 02:22 PM
This will be money well spent. The development of advanced materials and structures requires much better numerical simulation capability than exists now.
Posted by: richard schumacher | 07 August 2012 at 05:51 PM
@rs
perhaps you missed this "and the National Nuclear Security Administration"
Posted by: dursun | 07 August 2012 at 08:48 PM
@HarveyD - your view is short sighted.
Posted by: TM | 12 August 2012 at 01:41 PM