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Obama's New Executive Order Says the US Must Build an Exascale Supercomputer

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

Jason Koebler writes: President Obama has signed an executive order authorizing a new supercomputing research initiative with the goal of creating the fastest supercomputers ever devised. The National Strategic Computing Initiative, or NSCI, will attempt to build the first ever exascale computer, 30 times faster than today's fastest supercomputer. Motherboard reports: "The initiative will primarily be a partnership between the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and National Science Foundation, which will be designing supercomputers primarily for use by NASA, the FBI, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Homeland Security, and NOAA. Each of those agencies will be allowed to provide input during the early stages of the development of these new computers."

3 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. 30 Times Faster? by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For most specific problems thrown at supercomputers, you can go 30 times faster with a custom hardware architecture baked into silicon

    To go 30 times fast for general purpose supercomputing, you use the latest silicon (2X) and more chips (15X) and come up with a super new interconnect to make it not suck. This would involve making some chips that support low latency IPC in hardware.

    They are free to send me a few billion dollars, I'll get right on it and deliver a 30X faster machine and I'l even use some blue LEDs on the front panel.

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
  2. Classified Data by Etherwalk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What would the existence of an exascale supercomputer mean for today's popular encryption/hashing algorithms?

    Exactly.

    My first thought was the new addition will be tasked by the NSA/FiveEyes to break encryption for intercepted communications.

    Why are you assuming they don't already have one doing that, and this is just a public version?

    There is a lot of highly secured government data infrastructure out there that I hear about even though not inquiring. The cable in Virginia that gets cut by a backhoe accidentally and guys in a black van show up ten minutes later. The contract for a government data center inside a faraday cage. The government likely already has much more computing power available than we know about.

  3. Re:Likely a new gift for the NSA by TigerPlish · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Weather guys want this after NSA's done.

    We'll take a side of phased-array weather radar to go with that, too.

    --
    The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.