US wants to build exascale computers within ten years

The US government has set a goal of building exaflops clusters within ten years. The goal is part of the National Strategic Computing Initiative, which aims to give the US a leading role in supercomputing.

The supercomputers must be able to process enormous amounts of data. “Over the next decade, systems must be able to handle and analyze data sets greater than one exabyte, 1018 bytes,” the White House said. According to the US government, the handling of big data is already having ‘revolutionary impact’ on the commercial and scientific sectors. The government is citing claims by NASA that exaflops computing enables the full modeling of turbulence in simulations, which is important for aircraft design.

Concrete financial commitments or other practical steps have not yet been laid down in the decision to initiate the National Strategic Computing Initiative. For the time being, it concerns a ‘coordinated strategy’ in the field of research, development and roll-out. The systems will be used to simulate galaxies, the weather, electricity grids and airplanes, among other things.

Today’s most powerful supercomputer is the Tianhe-2 from the Chinese National University of Defense Technology. The system delivers 33.86 petaflops as measured by the Linpack benchmarks. The U.S. Department of Energy is currently building two systems that should each deliver 100 petaflops when completed in 2017. Petaflops stands for 1015, or a quadrillion floating point operations per second; for exaflops, that’s 1018 flops, or a billion billion.