Five high performance computing companies are receiving a total of $62 million in research and development funding from the Department of Energy aimed at accelerating the nation’s push toward exascale supercomputing, which would be 1,000 times faster than today’s supercomputers. Through a combined National Nuclear Security Administration/Office of Science initiative dubbed FastForward, AMD, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, and Whamcloud received awards, which are targeted at advancing “extreme scale” computing technology and producing innovative technologies to “deliver next generation capabilities within a reasonable energy footprint.”
AMD and IBM are directing their research on processors and memory for extreme systems, Intel is focusing on energy efficient processors and memory architectures, Nvidia is researching processor architecture for exascale computing at low power, and Whamcloud is leading a team developing new storage and input/output technologies. “Recognizing that the broader computing market will drive innovation in a direction that may not meet DOE mission needs in national security and science, we need to ensure that exascale systems will meet the extreme requirements in computation, data movement and reliability that DOE applications require,” William Harrod, the division director of research in the Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, said in a statement.
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