The U.S. Department of Energy says it is working on a supercomputer that will break the target of exaFLOP computation – a quintillion (1018) floating-point computations per second – in order to handle high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.
Being built in conjunction with Intel and Cray Computing, the Aurora supercomputer will cost more than half a billion dollars and be turned over to Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 2021, according to a statement by the DoE. [Click here to see the current top 10 fastest supercomputers.]
“Aurora and the next-generation of Exascale supercomputers will apply HPC and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, climate modeling, and veterans’ health treatments,” says Energy Secretary Rick Perry. “The innovative advancements that will be made with Exascale will have an incredibly significant impact on our society.”
Projects include “developing extreme-scale cosmological simulations, discovering new approaches for drug response prediction, and discovering materials for the creation of more efficient organic solar cells,” DoE said in a statement.
“Argonne’s Aurora system is built for next-generation Artificial Intelligence and will accelerate scientific discovery by combining high-performance computing and artificial intelligence to address real world problems,” says Argonne Director Paul Kearns, “such
as improving extreme weather forecasting, accelerating medical treatments, mapping the human brain, developing new materials, and further understanding the universe – and that is just the beginning.”
The underpinnings of Aurora will be
