President Obama issues an executive order in an attempt to build the world's first exascale supercomputer

President Obama has just signed an executive order for the creation of a National Strategic Computer Initiative (NSCI). This is in hope of putting his country ahead of the global supercomputing race. The NSCI will attempt to build the world’s first exascale supercomputer that will be 30 times faster than China’s Tianhe-2. As of July this year, the Chinese computing behemoth is still ranked by TOP500 project as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, all thanks to its ability to deliver 33.86 petaflops of peak performance.

As for the NSCI, it will entail collaborations between the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. The exact hardware specifications of the envisioned supercomputer weren’t revealed in the executive order but it did enshrine five important objectives. One of which was a 15-year plan to pave a “viable path” for future HPC systems, which aren’t limited by the current limits of semiconductor technology, i.e., the post-Moore’s Law era. Ultimately, according to the last tenet, the “benefits of research and development advances” are to be shared between the US government and both the industrial and academic sectors.

In case you are wondering, the second most powerful supercomputer resides in the United States of America; the Titan Cray XK7, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has a peak performance of 17.59 petaflops. If NSCI successfully pulls off this monumental project, it will put the US at the top of the TOP500 project’s ranking list for a very long time.

(Source: The White House, Wired, Wikipedia, nextBigfuture)

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