Via Gov Computer News -
Two Energy Department labs are building a supercomputer that will be capable of executing more than one quintillion floating-point operations/sec, or one exaflop, the department announced this week.
Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating on the system. Congress has allotted $7.4 million for the project in fiscal 2008.
The computer will work on tough scientific problems, such as modeling how large numbers of particles interact with one another.
“An exascale computer is essential to perform more accurate simulations that, in turn, support solutions for emerging science and engineering challenges in national defense, energy assurance, advanced materials, climate and medicine,” said James Peery, Sandia's director of computation, computers and math, in a statement.
The plan to build an exaflop computer is an ambitious one. In comparison, an exaflop is 1,000 times faster than a petaflop, which is 1,000 trillion flops.
No existing supercomputer system has achieved petaflop performance yet, though the National Science Foundation has funded IBM to build such a machine.
Today's fastest supercomputer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's BlueGene/L System, has a processing speed of 478.2 trillion teraflops.
--------------------
The fastest publicly known supercomputer, that is...
No comments:
Post a Comment