US Department of Energy has requested a third of a billion dollars for supercomputers

The US Department of Energy plans to spend $ 325 million on two new supercomputers, which will return to America the world leadership in this area, shamefully lost after the Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2 was put into operation last year (33.86 petaflops).

1 petaflops equals a quadrillion floating point operations per second.
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The money will be invested in the creation of two systems, each with a base capacity of 150 petaflops. After receiving additional permission from the government, the power of supercomputers is planned to be increased to 300 petaflops.

Supercomputers can be commissioned already in 2017 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the 20-petaflops Titan supercomputer is now installed (see photo).

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

The number of crushers is planned to use IBM Power and Nvidia Volta GPU chips, and the latter will provide about 90% of Summit's computing power (according to information from Nvidia representatives who are familiar with US Department of Energy plans).

Americans believe that 300 petaflops will bring their cars to the first lines in the world Top 500 ranking. However, in the field of high-performance computing, progress is proceeding at such a pace that by 2017 it is still unknown who will be in the lead of this rating.

Apparently, the United States considers the return of the title of world leader among supercomputers as a strategically important task. In addition to the above $ 325 million, the Department of Energy proposes to reserve $ 100 million for research in this area.

In recent years, the United States is rapidly losing ground in the Top 500 ranking: in a short time, the number of American supercomputers on the list has decreased from 291 to 233.

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

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