For the past several years, the world's power have been locked in a supercomputing arms race, one-upping one another with biggest and faster achievements. According to a new announcement, the world’s fastest supercomputer is coming to the United States in 2021 and will be the first to break the so-called "exascale" barrier.
The top-performing supercomputer in the world right now is the Summit computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That computer reaches 150 petaflops, several thousand times as much processing power as a typical laptop. Several other top supercomputers reach a few dozen petaflops as well. But the big target in supercomputer construction right now is building the first exascale computer, capable of a quintillion calculations per second. Such a computer would be a million times faster than a typical desktop and could dramatically advance scientific and artificial intelligence research.
According to an announcement from the Department of Energy, that first exascale computer is finally coming. Thanks to $500 million from the DoE, a 1 exaflop computer named Aurora will be built at Argonne National Laboratory. The computer will be built using architecture and technology from Intel.