US Officials Make $425 Million Investment In Supercomputer R&D

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The US Department of Energy announced Friday that it had awarded $425 million for research and the development of next-generation supercomputers at the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL).
According to the Wall Street Journal, $325 million of that will be used to install new, cutting-edge supercomputers at the Tennessee and California-based research centers. The machines will utilize Nvidia processors and will be capable of completing calculations between five and seven times faster than the country’s current top computers, officials said.
The supercomputers will be built as part of the CORAL (Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore) initiative, which was established earlier this year to leverage supercomputer investments and reduce development costs. The Oak Ridge computer has been dubbed “Summit” and will operate at 150 petaflops, while the LLNL one has been named “Sierra” and will function at 100 petaflops, said Reuters reporter Noel Randewich.
The remaining $100 million will go towards the development of extreme-scale supercomputing technologies as part of the FastForward 2 research and development project, the Department of Energy said in a statement. The goal of FastForward 2 will be “to deliver next-generation capabilities that will enable affordable and energy-efficient advanced extreme scale computing research and development for the next decade.”
“High-performance computing is an essential component of the science and technology portfolio required to maintain U.S. competitiveness and ensure our economic and national security,” said Energy Ernest Secretary Moniz. “We expect that critical supercomputing investments like CORAL and FastForward 2 will again lead to transformational advancements in basic science, national defense, environmental and energy research that rely on simulations of complex physical systems and analysis of massive amounts of data.”
“In an era of increasing global competition in high-performance computing, advancing the Department of Energy’s computing capabilities is key to sustaining the innovation edge in science and technology that underpins US national and economic security while driving down the energy and costs of computing,” the agency added. “The overall goal of both CORAL and FastForward 2 is to establish the foundation for the development of exascale computing systems that would be 20-40 times faster than today’s leading supercomputers.”
Currently, the world’s fastest machine is China’s Tianhe-2 machine, which PC Magazine’s Michael J Miller said has a peak performance of just 54.9 peak petaflops. Furthermore, Miller noted that the total computing power of the 500 most powerful systems as of just a few months ago was only 274 petaflops, while IBM assured him that both Summit and Sierra will have peak performance capabilities that are “well in excess of 100 petaflops.”
Installation of the two computers is expected to begin in 2017, said WSJ reporter Don Clark, and Randewich noted that both domestic researchers and those located throughout the world will be able to apply to use the Summit computer. Sierra, on the other hand, will be used by the National Nuclear Security Administration to ensure that the country’s nuclear arsenal is safe, secure and effective without the need for testing, Nvidia told him.
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