Based on a national strategic computing initiative, Obama has recently issued an executive order that calls for Americans to develop the world’s fastest computer by 2025.
This initiative, in particular, aims to build a cohesive, multi-agency strategic vision apart from a federal investment strategy in high performance computing that collaborates with both academia and industry.
The objective is to be able to process one exaflop or 10 to the power of 18 operations per second. This will include handling big data across diverse systems.
China currently has the fastest supercomputer, known as the Tianhe-2, and which runs at a speed of 33.86 petaflops. It’s clear that Obama wants the United States to get back on top in this regard.
Of course, the second-fastest computer in the world belongs to the United States – the Titan Cray XK7 located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The system runs at a speed of 17.59 petaflops.
Apart from this, the country also has the most number of supercomputers in the top 500 list – about 233 in all – and compared to 141 from Europe and 37 in China.
With the launch of this initiative, the United States government clearly believes that these HPC machines are vital to national security, scientific discovery and economic competitiveness.
Given the ability to compute large amounts of data, some of the areas in which HPC can be useful will be analyze cancer from X-ray images as well as simulations of weather. The latter can be compiled along with observations from weather satellites.
UK experts believe that a major deterrent to US efforts in building the fastest supercomputer will involve increasing the power of components.