President Obama has signed an executive order to create a cross-governmental program called the National Strategic Computing Initiative (N.S.C.I.), which will seek to produce the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2025. The fastest computer in existence today, the Chinese-owned Tianhe-2, is capable of carrying out almost 34 quadrillion functions per second. The N.S.C.I. will be tasked with creating a computer 30 times faster, capable of executing 1 quintillion operations a second (one “exaflop”).
This is an extremely important step for high performance computing in the U.S.,
said deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Horst Simon, a computer science expert.
In creating the fastest computer, the federal government hopes to aid medical research and increase our understanding in a variety of fields, including meteorology, biology, and astronomy. The U.S. Department of Energy currently has the second-fastest computer, which can carry out 17 quadrillion functions per second. By 2018, a partnership of the D.O.E., Intel, and Cray hope to create a supercomputer capable of 180 quadrillion operations per second.
Read more here – “U.S. Sets Goal for Faster Supercomputers. Much, Much Faster,” (Daniel Victor, New York Times).
