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department of energy

Intel and Cray contracted by US government to develop ‘first exascale supercomputer’

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Chip giant Intel and high-performance computing specialist Cray are both working with the US government’s Department of Energy to develop what is claimed to be the world’s first exascale supercomputer.

The word “exascale” in this context refers to computing systems capable of at least one billion billion – or one quintillion – floating-point operations, or FLOPs.

That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 computer calculations per second and represents a thousandfold increase over petascale supercomputers, which is the de facto standard today.  [Read more…] about Intel and Cray contracted by US government to develop ‘first exascale supercomputer’

US unveils first supercomputer built using Arm chips

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Arm-based supercomputer prototype to be deployed at Sandia National Laboratories by Department of Energy

Microprocessors designed by Arm are ubiquitous in automobile electronics, cellphones, and other embedded applications, but until recently they have not provided the performance necessary to make them practical for high-performance computing.

Astra, one of the first supercomputers to use processors based on the Arm architecture in a large-scale high-performance computing platform, is expected to be deployed in late summer at Sandia National Laboratories.

The US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration says that Astra, the first of a potential series of advanced architecture prototype platforms, will be deployed as part of the Vanguard program.  [Read more…] about US unveils first supercomputer built using Arm chips