The project, known as the National Strategic Computing Initiative, aims to speed up the development of an “exascale computing system” — a supercomputer that can process a billion billion operations per second. (That’s not a typo, there are two billions there.) It’s a system that is hard to fathom, but could revolutionize the way scientists measure climate change, discover new materials, and study the human brain.
“I think somewhere along the lines of a hundred million to a billion modern-day laptops would represent the early stages of exascale computing,” said Thomas Sterling, a professor at the Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing and chief scientist at its Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies.
But just what this computer would look like or exactly how long it will take to create is still unclear.
“The truth is that if you go back to the 1960s, the technology for a moonshot was largely known. It was largely an engineering effort, albeit one of tremendous scale,” said J. Steve Binkley, the associate director of the Department of Energy’s office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “In the case of exascale, there are a couple of areas where we still need to do active research.”