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Obama Calls For 1 Exaflop Super Computer In Next Decade

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The United States is still home to five of the top ten highest performing super computers in the world, but the fastest system currently resides in China and President Obama wants to change that. The President has issued an executive order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and urging for the construction of super computer capable of executing 1 exaflop – that’s 10 18 operations per second.

From the posting on the White House website, “With the availability of large data sets, including web pages, genome datasets, and the outputs of scientific instruments, data analytics has emerged as a new form of large-scale computing, extracting meaningful insights from diverse data collections. These big data approaches have had a revolutionary impact in both the commercial sector and in scientific discovery. Over the next decade, these systems will manage and analyze data sets of up to one exabyte.” To process an exabyte of data in a meaningful timeframe, hugely powerful systems will be required.

Humans continue to generate immense amount of data and analyzing said data requires massive amounts of storage and compute performance. Technologies like Intel / Micron’s recently announced 3D Xpoint memory and faster and wider processors, like those built by NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD may be used in these next-gen systems, but the White House is also calling for new algorithms and techniques to analyze extremely large data sets. The executive order also asserts that high-performance super computers “must now assume a broader meaning, encompassing not only flops, but also the ability, for example, to efficiently manipulate vast and rapidly increasing quantities of both numerical and non-numerical data.”

The Cray XK7, The Fastest Super Computer In The US Uses AMD Opteron Processors And NVIDIA GPUs.

The fastest super computers of today top out in the 27 – 54 Petaflop range (theoretical peaks), so shooting for 1 exaflop is a lofty goal indeed. If Moore’s Law holds out for the next few years, however, it should absolutely be doable.  I believe the technology will inevitably get there—sooner rather than later--and it’s more a matter of focus and funding for the U.S. to pull this off. Performance of the top super computers doubled every year from 2011 to 2013, there’s no reason to think that trend can’t continue.

“By strategically investing now, we can prepare for increasing computing demands and emerging technological challenges, building the foundation for sustained U.S. leadership for decades to come, while also expanding the role of high-performance computing to address the pressing challenges faced across many sectors.” Hopefully the U.S. pull this off and regains a leadership position in the super computer space. And if so, let’s also hope the systems are used for the greater good and not some other “questionable” purpose.