The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced two new high performance computing awards.
DOE’s Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories will receive $325 million to build two state-of-the-art supercomputers. The joint collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) was established in early 2014 to leverage supercomputing investments, streamline procurement processes and reduce costs to develop US supercomputers that will be five to seven times more powerful than today’s fastest systems when fully deployed.
The DOE also announced about $100 million to further develop extreme scale supercomputing technologies as part of a research and development program titled FastForward2.
Both CORAL awards leverage IBM Power Architecture processors, chipmaker NVIDIA’s Volta Graphics Processing Units and Mellanox’s Interconnected technologies to advance key research initiatives for national nuclear deterrence, technology advancement and scientific discovery.
Capable of delivering 150 to 300 peak petaflops, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL’s) new system, Summit, is expected to provide at least five times the performance of ORNL’s current leadership system, Titan. Summit will be dedicated to open science, meaning that researchers worldwide will have the opportunity to apply for time on the system.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) new supercomputer, Sierra, is expected to be at least seven times more powerful than LLNL’s current machine, Sequoia. It will be capable of delivering performance well in excess of 100 peak petaflops and will be a key element of LLNL’s national nuclear security mission.
The US is investing in Summit and Sierra to achieve breakthroughs that lead to greater US energy independence, new approaches to curbing climate change, improvements in fuel efficiency, natural disaster prediction, safer nuclear material storage and economic competitiveness.
FastForward2, seeks to develop technologies needed to deliver capabilities that will enable affordable and energy-efficient advanced extreme scale computing research and development for the next decade. The joint project between DOE Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will be led by computing industry leaders AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel and NVIDIA.
Argonne National Laboratory will announce its CORAL award at a later time.
The overall goal of both CORAL and FastForward2 is to establish the foundation for the development of exascale computing systems that would be 20–40 times faster than today’s leading supercomputers.
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