US government awards millions to HPE, Intel, and others in hopes they’ll build next-gen supercomputers
To try and edge the United States ahead of other countries in the arms race of building supercomputers, the Department of Energy today awarded a total of $258 million in funding to HPE, Cray, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Nvidia. The money will be put toward developing exascale computers, which are capable of a billion calculations per second.
The $258 million in funding will be allocated over a three-year contract period. Each company has also agreed to provide at least 40 percent of their individual total project costs, for a total investment of $430 million. Exascale computing can transcend the limits of regular computing. These limits include big data too large to ingest, outdated systems, and large energy consumption.
Engineers are...