American plans envision 50x gain in solving science problems For decades, the U.S. took for granted the doubling of supercomputing power every 10 years, roughly in line with Moore’s Law. But once a petascale system was reached in 2008, it gradually became clear that the next leap — a system 1,000 times more powerful — would be difficult. Initially, some believed such a system — an exascale computer — was possible in 10 years, or by 2018. But problems emerged. It took too much power, and it required new approaches to applications to utilize an almost unimaginable level of parallelism involving hundreds of millions of cores. Another problem to solve was the need for resilience, or an ability to continue to working around multiple ongoing hardware failures expected in a system of this size. The new deadline is 2023, or 15 years after reaching petascale. An exaflop is a million trillion calculations per second (one quintillion). That is 1,000 times faster than a petaflop. In other words, the government is aiming for a system that can solve science problems 50 times faster than the 20-petaflop systems now available. “The U.S. faces serious and urgent economic, environmental, and national security challenges based on energy, climate, and growing security threats,” wrote the U.S. Department of Energy, in a briefing document that was prepared for systems vendors. They met earlier this month with U.S. officials for an information session about the systems. “High performance computing (HPC) is a requirement for addressing such challenges, and the need for the development of capable exascale computers has become critical for solving these problems,” the government said. This system, as imagined, will use between 20MW to 30MW of power, or roughly the output of a small power plant. U.S. spending reflects this. The government will spend nearly $300 million this year on developing an exascale system, and has proposed spending a little more than that next year. The total cost for an exascale system is estimated at about $3 billion, according released DOE planning documents. The U.S. is also in a race with China, Europe and Japan to build an exascale system. Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee and one of the people behind the Top 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, said China has two projects aiming at 100 petaflops, and will probably soon make an announcement. Steve Conway, an analyst at IDC, said the race to build an exascale system “is really up for grabs at this point.” It’s hard to tell who will get there first, what they are actually crossing the finish line with and “how useable it will be.” Related content analysis With three zero-days, it’s a patch-now Patch Tuesday for May This is one of those months where it’s important to roll out Microsoft’s latest round of fixes as soon as you can. By Greg Lambert May 17, 2024 9 mins Microsoft Windows 10 Windows Security opinion Review: The M4 iPad Pro — an amazing AI PC Light, thin, and indiscreetly powerful, Apple's new iPad Pro will be seen as more than just a tablet once Apple introduces genAI in iPadOS. By Jonny Evans May 17, 2024 11 mins iPad Apple iOS news Citrix parent mulls selling ShareFile amid streamlining efforts The disinvestment of ShareFile is seen as a strategic move by Cloud Software Group to refocus on its core competencies. By Gyana Swain May 17, 2024 3 mins Citrix Systems Collaboration Software news Google brings Gemini AI to the classroom Google is making its Gemini AI assistant available for Workspace for Education customers beginning on May 23. By Matthew Finnegan May 17, 2024 4 mins Education Industry Generative AI Google Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe