Increase investment, hoping to continue to maintain superiority in the field of supercomputing

 

 

 

 

 

According to reports, the six companies receiving funding are AMD (Superpower Semiconductor Corporation), CRAYD (Cray Company), HP, IBM, Intel and Nvidia. The funds of US$258 million will be allocated during the three-year contract period. The funds provided by each company account for at least 40% of the total project cost, and the total investment is approximately US$430 million.

 

 

 

The project is part of the United States' "Road Forward" plan, which aims to accelerate the deployment of the first exascale (10 to the 18th power) sub-supercomputer program in the United States in 2021. This supercomputer can perform tens of billions of floating point operations per second. The goal of the "road ahead" plan is to solve the four key challenges facing the development of supercomputers, including parallel computing, storage, reliability, and energy consumption. The work it will fund will include the research and development of new memory architectures, higher-speed interconnection and higher reliability systems, and new methods that can increase computing power without increasing energy consumption.

 

U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said in a statement: "Maintaining the U.S. leadership in the field of high-performance computing is vital to the country’s security, prosperity, and economic competition. Research funding will enable these U.S. leading technologies The company has stronger computing capabilities in the next stage of development in the supercomputing field, so as to maintain strong technology, expertise, and resources in global competition."

 

 

 

The U.S. Department of Energy made such a decision because of the rapid development of China, Japan and other countries in the field of supercomputing, and the United States is facing tremendous competitive pressure in the field of supercomputing. In the global supercomputer 500 list released by the 2017 International Supercomputing Conference, among the top ten, China occupies the top two places, Switzerland took the third place, and the United States fell out of the top three for the first time in 20 years. It is undeniable that in the fourth to tenth places, except for two seats in Japan, the rest are "Made in the United States."

 

 

 

The overall strength of the "veteran empire" in the supercomputing field remains strong

 

 

 

 

Someone has made a vivid analogy: If the computing speed of an ordinary computer is compared to the walking speed of a person, then the supercomputer has reached the speed of a rocket. At this speed of operation, people can predict and explain natural phenomena that could not be verified before through numerical simulation. Supercomputers are computers with the strongest functions, fastest calculation speed, and largest storage capacity. They are mostly used in national high-tech fields and cutting-edge technology research. They are a manifestation of a country’s scientific research strength and are important for national security, economic and social development. The pivotal significance is also an important indicator of the level of national technological development and overall national strength.

 

 

 

El Kazaway, director of the Center for High-Performance Computing at George Washington University in the United States, said that because supercomputers can perform a large number of sophisticated analog operations, they can be used in commerce, medical research and development, and have great economic value. Many of the technological products we use now are actually the results of supercomputer simulations over the past few decades. For example, the Boeing 777 passenger plane was the first aircraft designed entirely through supercomputers. Therefore, supercomputers are very important for a country's future technological and economic development.

 

 

 

As the "old empire" of the supercomputer world, the overall strength of the United States remains strong. In the face of competition from other countries in the field of supercomputers, the United States currently adopts three main strategies: First, increase investment. The U.S. Department of Energy stated that the government is completing the goals of the National Strategic Computing Plan: to accelerate the development of exascale computing systems, increase the continuity between the technologies used for modeling and simulation and those used for data analysis and calculation, and formulate The development path in the post-Moore's Law era. The second is all-round development. The U.S. government has more than 700 national laboratories, including more than 1,500 R&D facilities, with a total annual R&D expenditure of more than 100 billion U.S. dollars. According to reports, the National Supercomputing Application Center of the University of Illinois and the Oak Ridge National Computer Science Research Center are all stepping up the development of "revolutionary" next-generation supercomputers. The third is to control the outflow of technology. In 2015, the US government issued an order prohibiting Intel from supplying its fastest computer chips to top foreign supercomputer projects.