US DOE Sets Sights On 300 Petaflop Supercomputer

dcblogs writes U.S. officials Friday announced plans to spend $325 million on two new supercomputers, one of which may eventually be built to support speeds of up to 300 petaflops. The U.S. Department of Energy, the major funder of supercomputers used for scientific research, wants to have the two systems – each with a base speed of 150 petaflops – possibly running by 2017. Going beyond the base speed to reach 300 petaflops will take additional government approvals. If the world stands still, the U.S. may conceivably regain the lead in supercomputing speed from China with these new systems. How adequate this planned investment will look three years from now is a question. Lawmakers weren't reading from the same script as U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz when it came to assessing the U.S.'s place in the supercomputing world. Moniz said the awards "will ensure the United States retains global leadership in supercomputing." But Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) put U.S. leadership in the past tense. "Supercomputing is one of those things that we can step up and lead the world again," he said.

Comments

Nice and all, but where's the beef?

[DumbSwede]

I remember back in the 80's all the excitement about building faster and faster super computers to solve all sorts of grand challenge problems and how a teraflop would just about be nirvana for science. Around 2000 teraflops came and went and then petaflops became the new nirvana for science where we would be able to solve grand challenge problems. Now exaflop is the new nirvana that will solve grand challenge science problems once again. Seems raw computing power hasn't given us the progress in science we predicted. Sure it's been used for stuff, but it hasn't helped us crack nuclear fusion for instance, one of its often hyped goals.

Where's the score card on how much progress has been made because of super computing? I know drug design is one very useful application, but what are other areas that have been transformed?

Re:Ehhh Meh

[fahrbot-bot]

The number of floating point operations (FLOPS) performed by a next-generation game console outranks early days supercomputers like the Cray.

Sure, but do they have the system capability / bandwidth to actually do anything with those numbers and is their raw speed offset by not being vector processors like the Cray 2 (process an entire array of data in 1 instruction)? I'm not a hardware geek, but was an administrator for the Cray 2 at the NASA Langley Research Center back in the mid 1980s and, among other things, wrote a proof-of-concept program in C to perform Fast Fourier transforms on wind tunnel data in near real time - probably would have been faster had I been a FORTRAN geek - and the system could pump through quite a bit of data - at least for the 80s.

And the Cray 2 was way prettier than a PS3/4 or Xbox, though the Fluorinert immersion used for cooling is a bit cumbersome and expensive :-)