Recently, the US department of Energy has granted $325 million to several high tech companies like IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox to build two new supercomputers.
The GPU-accelerated supercomputers named Sierra and Summit would be operational by 2017. IBM will provide OpenPower chips, NVIDIA will give new graphics chip known as Volta and the Mellanox will deliver high speed networking to build up these supercomputers.
From both of Sierra and Summit, Summit would be more powerful in terms of its capacities and will probably convey 150-300 peak petaflops. It will available for both scientific and civilian use, though Sierra will just be used in nuclear weapon simulations at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Until now, Oak Ridge’s supercomputer called Titan is the fastest in the world, these two new inventories are going to be out racing Titan which conveys only 27 peak petaflop.
Jen-Hsun Huang, and co-founder of NVIDIA said, “Today’s science is tomorrow’s technology. Researchers are undertaking enormous challenges from quantum to global to galactic scales. Their work relies on increasingly more powerful supercomputers. Through the invention of GPU acceleration, we have paved the path to exascale super-computing — giving scientists a tool for unimaginable discoveries.”
Moreover, the Deparmtent of Energy also granted additional $100 million for technology development related to these powerful computing mechanisms.
