Intel and Cray are constructing a $500 million ‘exascale’ supercomputer for Argonne National Lab
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| Image credit - TechCrunch |
In a way, I even have the equal of a Intel and Cray are constructing a $500 million ‘exascale’ supercomputer for Argonne National Lab in my pocket. But in another, extra vital way, that pocket laptop is a funny story in comparison with actual supercomputers — and Intel and Cray are setting collectively one in every of the most important ever with a half-billion-greenback settlement from the Department of Energy. It’s going to do exaflops!
The “Aurora” software goals to prepare an “exascale” computing machine for Argonne National Laboratory with the aid of using 2021. The “exa” is prefix indicating bigness, in this example 1 quintillion floating factor operations, or FLOPs. They’re type of the horsepower score of supercomputers.
For comparison, your common contemporary-day CPU does perhaps one hundred or extra gigaflops. A thousand gigaflops makes a teraflop, one thousand teraflops makes a petaflop, and one thousand petaflops makes an exaflop. So no matter essential advances in computing performance going into making extremely good effective smartphones and desktops, we’re speaking numerous orders of value difference. (Let’s now no longer get into GPUs, it’s complicated.)
And even if in comparison with the most important supercomputers and clusters out there, you’re nevertheless searching at a max of two hundred petaflops (that could be IBM’s Summit, over at Oak Ridge National Lab) or thereabouts.
Just what do you want that type of computing electricity for? Petaflops wouldn’t do it? Well, no, actually. One very current instance of computing barriers in actual-global studies became this look at of the way weather alternate ought to have an effect on cloud formation in positive regions, reinforcing the fashion and main to a vicious cycle
