Ernest Moniz, U.S. Secretary of Energy, announced that the Department of Energy will be building two supercomputers for a total investment of $425 million.
The two supercomputers will be able to place the United States on the fast lane toward the development of next-generation exascale computing, which will aid in the advancement of the country's leadership in research and the promotion of national and economic security.
According to Moniz, $325 million of the total amount will be used for the production of two supercomputers at the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories of the Department of Energy.
The Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) was founded early this year for the leveraging of investments in supercomputing, streamlining of procurement processes and the reduction of costs related to the development of the supercomputers, which will be between five to seven times more powerful compared to the fastest systems in the U.S. today.
The rest of the amount, which is about $100 million, will be used for the further development of supercomputing technologies under the FastForward 2 R&D program.
According to Moniz, the department's investments in CORAL and FastForward 2 are expected to lead to significant developments in the fields of basic science, energy and environmental research and national defense, which depend on the analysis of huge amounts of data and simulations of complex systems.
Both aspects of the project utilize the Power Architecture of IBM, Volta GPU of Nvidia and the Interconnected technology of Mellanox.
Summit, the new system of Oak Ridge, is expected to be at least five times more powerful compared to Titan, which is the current system being used by the national laboratory. Sierra, the new system of Lawrence Livermore, on the other hand, is set to be at least seven times faster compared to Sequoia, which is the current system being used.
Argonne, however, is yet to announce its new system, and it will do so at a later time.
FastForward 2, the second component of Moniz's announcement, is a joint project between the Office of Science of the DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The project will be led by leaders in the computing industry, namely IBM, AMD, Intel, Cray and NVIDIA.
The main goal of CORAL and FastForward 2 is the establishment of the foundation for exascale computing system development, which could lead to systems that are 20 to 40 times faster compared to the fastest supercomputers today.
