The US Department of Energy said it is spending $425 million to research extreme-scale computing and build two super-computers, which would be the world’s fastest, for research into basic science as well as nuclear weapons.
The DOE is awarding $325m to build “Summit” for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and “Sierra” at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
An additional $100m will go to research into “extreme scale supercomputing” technology as part of a programme called FastForward2, the DOE said in a news release.
The supercomputers, made with components from IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox, will run five to seven times faster than the United States’ current fastest computers.
Summit and Sierra will operate at 150 petaflops and 100 petaflops, respectively, compared to the world’s current top super-computer, the Tianhe-2 in China, which performs at 55 petaflops, Nvidia said in a separate news release.
