US Building World's First Quintillion Per Second $500Mln Super-Computer - Energy Dept.

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th March, 2019) The US government and Intel are collaborating to build the world's first ever exaFLOP computer capable of one quintillion computations per second at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, the Department of Energy (DOE) said on Monday.

"Intel Corporation and the DOE will build the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States," the announcement said. "The contract is valued at over $500 million and will be delivered to Argonne National Laboratory by Intel and sub-contractor Cray Computing in 2021."

The Aurora system will foster new scientific innovation and usher in new technological capabilities, furthering the United States' scientific leadership position globally, the announcement said.

"The Aurora systems' exaFLOP of performance - equal to a quintillion floating point computations per second - combined with an ability to handle ... traditional high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) - will give researchers an unprecedented set of tools," the announcement said.

Proposed breakthrough research projects range from developing extreme-scale cosmological simulations, discovering new approaches for drug response prediction, and discovering materials for the creation of more efficient organic solar cells, the Energy Department said.