US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order setting up the National Strategic Computing Initiative that will adopt a coordinated strategy involving multiple government agencies, academia and the private sector for the development of high-performance computing systems.
Adopting a “whole-of-government” approach, involving all departments and agencies with expertise and interests in HPC, one of the objectives of the NSCI will be to speed up the delivery of “a capable exascale computing system that integrates hardware and software capability to deliver approximately 100 times the performance of current 10 petaflop systems across a range of applications representing government needs.”
China currently leads the supercomputer race with the Tianhe-2 computer, developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, heading the list for over two years. The Tianhe-2’s maximum achieved performance of 33.86 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark is almost double that of Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer installed at the U.S. Department of Energy, which rated 17.59 petaflops per second, according to latest edition of the Top500 list of the world’s top supercomputers.
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