Six Companies Awarded $258 Million From US Government To Build Exascale Supercomputers (digitaltrends.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday June 15, 2017 @01:45PM from the next-gen-computing dept.

The U.S. Department of Energy will be investing $258 million to help six leading technology firms -- AMD, Cray Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia -- research and build exascale supercomputers. Digital Trends reports: The funding will be allocated to them over the course of a three-year period, with each company providing 40 percent of the overall project cost, contributing to an overall investment of $430 million in the project. "Continued U.S. leadership in high performance computing is essential to our security, prosperity, and economic competitiveness as a nation," U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said. "These awards will enable leading U.S. technology firms to marshal their formidable skills, expertise, and resources in the global race for the next stage in supercomputing -- exascale-capable systems." The funding will finance research and development in three key areas; hardware technology, software technology, and application development. There are hopes that one of the companies involved in the initiative will be able to deliver an exascale-capable supercomputer by 2021.

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It's down to picojoules by Laxator2 · 2017-06-15 20:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

I remember an article a couple of years back on this subject, and it explained that exascale computing is not feasible unless the energy cost of moving a single bit around goes down from the picojoules range into the femtojoules.
The closest reference I can find now is:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...
The relevant part is:
"Data needs to move on interconnects and they found that even using some really cool emerging technology it still cost 1-3 picojoules for a bit to go through just one interconnect level"