US DOE has requested a third of a billion dollars on supercomputers

US Department of Energy собирается spend $ 325 million on two new supercomputer that will put America world leadership in this field, shamefully lost after commissioning Chinese superkompyuter Tyanhe- 2 last year (33, 86 petaflops).

1 petaflop is a quadrillion floating point operations per second.

The money will be invested in the creation of two systems, each with a basic capacity of 150 petaflops. After obtaining further permission from the Government the power of supercomputers to be increased to 300 petaflops.

Supercomputers may come into operation in 2017, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now set to 20 petaflopsny supercomputer Titan (pictured).

The proposed system called the Summit will consume about 10 megawatts of power, which roughly corresponds to the characteristics of the current installation of Titan.

For "chislodrobilki" plan to use IBM Power chips and Nvidia Volta GPU, the latter being about 90% will provide computing power Summit (According to representatives of Nvidia, familiar with the plans of the US DOE).

Americans believe that 300 petaflops bring their cars to the first position in the world ranking of the top 500. However, in HPC progress comes at a pace that by the year 2017 is not yet known who will be the leader of this ranking.

Apparently, the United States believes the return of the title world's leading supercomputers, a strategically important task. In addition to the mentioned $ 325 million, DOE proposes to reserve $ 100 million for research in this area.

In recent years, the US is rapidly losing ground in the ranking Top 500 : for a short time, the number of American supercomputers on the list was reduced from 291 to 233.

Supercomputers are playing an increasingly important role in modern scientific research. Now almost every field of science there are tasks where supercomputers could help. The more powerful the machine, the greater the variety of tasks it can cheat.

In Russia there are 5 of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. For comparison, in Australia - 6, India - 9, Germany - 22.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/241504/