President Trump has picked some great people to work under him - Governor Rick Perry for Secretary of Energy is one. From Digital Trends:
NEXT-GEN SUPERCOMPUTERS TO GET $258M IN FUNDING FROM DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has detailed plans for $258 million in funding that is set to be distributed via the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project. The PathForward program will issue the money to six leading technology firms to help further their research into exascale supercomputers.
AMD, Cray Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia are the six companies chosen to receive financial support from the Department of Energy. The funding will be allocated to them over the course of a three-year period, with each company providing 40 percent of the overall project cost, contributing to an overall investment of $430 million in the project.
“Continued U.S. leadership in high performance computing is essential to our security, prosperity, and economic competitiveness as a nation,” Perry said. “These awards will enable leading U.S. technology firms to marshal their formidable skills, expertise, and resources in the global race for the next stage in supercomputing — exascale-capable systems.”
Department of Energy might seem like a strange place for this project but it makes sense in that they would be designing Nuclear Reactors and the computers would be used for modeling their operation. This would also be invaluable for climate and weather forecasting.
Here is the website for the project:
The Exascale Computing Project
The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) was established with the goals of maximizing the benefits of high-performance computing (HPC) for the United States and accelerating the development of a capable exascale computing ecosystem.
Exascale refers to computing systems at least 50 times faster than the nation’s most powerful supercomputers in use today.
The ECP is a collaborative effort of two U.S. Department of Energy organizations – the Office of Science (DOE-SC) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
ECP is chartered with accelerating delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem to provide breakthrough modeling and simulation solutions to address the most critical challenges in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security.
This role goes far beyond the limited scope of a physical computing system. ECP’s work encompasses the development of an entire exascale ecosystem: applications, system software, hardware technologies and architectures, along with critical workforce development.
If I was 30 years old again, I would already be camped out on their doorstep - this is going to be some amazing cutting-edge technology and the pure joy of it is that in ten years or so, this tech will trickle down to us poor schlubs running our own desktop systems.
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