U.S Attempts to Build World's Fastest Computer -

[Guest Lottie]

The U.S. Department of Energy has unveiled a new plan toward realizing its grand ambition of building the world's fastest computer. It will provide US$25 million in funding to three private-sector development partners: Cray , IBM and Silicon Graphics .

Their mission? To build a 50 teraflop (50 trillion calculations per second) science research supercomputer at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

"It is no exaggeration to say that this machine will give both the U.S. scientific community and industrial sector a significant competitive advantage over the rest of the world," said Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. "It will serve to revitalize the U.S. effort in high-end computing."

The supercomputer will also be available to the scientific community for research, according to the department.

ORNL Goes Through Its Paces

ORNL won the award in a peer-reviewed competition with three other Office of Science national laboratories.

It will be responsible for working with vendors and users to determine the best system architecture for the expected set of computation problems, the department said, working closely with Cray and IBM, as well as Argonne National Laboratory, other DOE national laboratories and universities.

Reaching Critical Mass

According to the Energy Department's plans, the capacity of the current ORNL Cray X1 computer will be increased to 20 teraflops during this year. Next year, it will be supplemented with a 20-teraflop Red Storm-based system from Cray.

Argonne National Laboratory expects to install a 5-teraflop IBM Blue Gene computer as part of the project. A 100-teraflop Cray system at Oak Ridge is planned for 2006, with the potential to increase to 250 teraflops in 2007.

The supercomputer at ORNL will be housed in a new 170,000 square foot facility that includes 400 staff and 40,000 square feet of space for computer systems and data storage . The machines will run on 12 megawatts of power supplied by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The Cray X1 is the first U.S. computer to offer vector processing and massively parallel processing capabilities in a single architecture.

Who To Beat

Reportedly, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is the Earth Simulator, created by Japanese computing firm NEC . It ties together 5,120 processors and can perform 35 trillion operations per second.

The United States, in one form or another, has been striving to dislodge NEC from its perch. Last year, for example, the Defense Department awarded some $146 million for three separate supercomputing initiatives to Cray, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

We're interested "in filling the gap between today's high-end computing ... and quantum computing," DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker told NewsFactor. Given that quantum computing will not reach its potential before several years, building the world's fastest computer is a good start.

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