The Department of Energy is investing $425 million in its pursuit of exascale supercomputing, including the award of two new supercomputers at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced the awards Friday, as well as a $100 million boost to DOE’s FastForward 2 program, which shepherds research and development into extreme scale supercomputing technologies. “High-performance computing is an essential component of the science and technology portfolio required to maintain U.S. competitiveness and ensure our economic and national security,” Moniz said in a statement. “DOE and its National Labs have always been at the forefront of HPC and we expect that critical supercomputing investments like CORAL and FastForward 2 will again lead to transformational advancements in basic science, national defense, environmental and energy research that rely on simulations of complex physical systems and analysis of massive amounts of data.”
The supercomputer awards at Livermore and Oak Ridge each will be developed by IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox. Livermore’s supercomputer will be called Sierra and is expected to be seven times more powerful than Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer. Oak Ridge’s supercomputer will be named Summit and is estimated to be at least five times faster than the lab’s Titan supercomputer, which is the fastest supercomputer in the nation. A third supercomputer award will go to Argonne National Laboratory at a later date as part of a joint program with Livermore and Oak Ridge, DOE said. FastForward 2, a joint program between DOE’s Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, is designed to develop affordable and energy efficient technologies to help in the pursuit of exascale computing over the next decade. The effort involves computing industry leaders like AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel, and NVIDIA.
