The five companies will have to come up with a way to enable exascale computing

Nov 16, 2013 10:27 GMT  ·  By

Supercomputers of today are several orders of magnitude better than those of a decade ago, and this situation is bound to repeat later down the line. Now we know who will be responsible for ensuring that further growth.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) office of science and the national nuclear security administration (NNSA) have awarded AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, IBM, and Cray an investment of $25.4 million / €18.83 million.

That cash will have to be used for researching and developing supercomputer interconnect designs and whatever else is needed to enable exascale computing (HPCs capable of at least one exaFLOP, a thousandfold increase over the first petascale / 1-PFLOP supercomputer from 2008).

Truth be told, that sum of money isn't that big compared to what the ones contracted make in a quarter, but it's still a lot for the intended purpose.