America to Develop Supercomputer Triple the Power of Current Model

General news News Tech Tech News 07/28/2024

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TECH NEWS – The Frontier, currently the most powerful of its kind, will soon be retired as another machine takes its throne.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is currently planning to build the world’s fastest supercomputer. It’s called Discovery, and it will be 3-5 times more powerful than the current leader, Frontier! The DOE has already put out a call for bids to build the machine, with the goal of completing production of Discovery by the end of 2027, early 2028. Since there could be some amazing developments in the industry between now and then, the three to five times multiplier may underestimate the real leap in performance that Discovery could achieve.

The Frontier is currently located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is capable of 1.3 ExaFLOPS. It has 8,699,904 cores (that’s not a typo: nearly 8.7 million!) and has been in the top 500 since May 2022. By comparison, Discovery has up to 6.5 ExaFLOPS. Supercomputers are important to U.S. national security because they also help the military develop technology. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can be taken over by the machine, while becoming much more energy efficient. The DOE’s 3-5x multiplier is only theoretical; the extent of the real performance increase is not yet known.

“Discovery will enable the scientific community to simulate the real world with new levels of detail. It will help us study challenging questions that cannot be easily explored by experiment, observation or theory alone,” said Georgia Tourassi, director of ORNL’s Computing and Computing Science Laboratory.

The timing of Discovery’s announcement is no coincidence: there have been recent rumors of a Chinese supercomputer that is 3-4 times more powerful than the Frontier. They have the Sunway and the Tianhe-3, but since the Asian country doesn’t give many details on performance, we can only speculate how much better the two machines are than the Frontier. The Sunway has about 39 million cores, which is more than four times the capacity of the Frontier.

We wonder how powerful the Discovery will be, but since it’s still a long way until the end of 2027, a lot can happen between now and then.

Source: WCCFTech, Top500, WSJ

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Angyal Anikó

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