14 DAY TRIAL // There is a certain appeal in systems capable of processing one quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second, and the US government is pulling all the stops and securing the assistance of all relevant IT players.
As it happens, Advanced Micro Devices just got word from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Extreme-Scale Computing Research and Development Program.
Apparently, the DOE will grant it up to $9.6 million (7.82 million Euro) in exchange for processor-related research.
What's more, the DOE is willing to funnel another $3 million (2.44 million) into AMD if it means the company can conduct some memory-related research on top of that.
The initiative of the Department of Energy is called “FastForward” and is jointly funded by DOE Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
"To prepare for the next phase of extreme scale computing, NNSA and DOE Office of Science are taking a proactive step in jointly making strategic investments in key areas such as processor, file storage and memory technologies with AMD and others,” said Thuc Hoang of DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
“A key to successfully developing next-generation HPC capabilities is bringing together the know-how and best minds of industry leaders and national labs to work on this grand challenge.”
The Top500 supercomputer list was renewed last month. AMD powers 24 of the best 100 HPC systems in the world.
FasForward aims to bring about the creation of much stronger conglomerates which, nonetheless, have similar, if not lower, power and space requirements.
AMD's Initial research will revolve around the Opteron CPUs, but it may touch upon the APU R&D expertise eventually too.
If all goes well, results will be palpable in five to ten years, in the shape of exascale supercomputers (one quintillion / a billion billion calculations per second).
“Extreme scale technology will create a whole new class of high performance computing systems that can achieve 1,000 times the performance of today’s petascale computers while limiting growth in space and power requirements,” said Dr. William J. Harrod, division director of Research, in the DOE Office of Science, ASCR.