Federal Government Information Technology

Energy Department Offers $1.8 Billion to Dethrone China in Supercomputing

NextGov: The Energy Department is looking to partner with industry to build what would become the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The agency on Monday published a request for proposal worth up to $1.8 billion to develop two exascale supercomputers, and a potential third supercomputer at some point in the future. The systems, which would each cost an estimated $400 to $600 million to build, are scheduled for completion between 2021 and 2023.

The computers would outperform China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, the most powerful machine in existence, by more than tenfold and run 50- to 100-times faster than the current fastest computer in the U.S. Technologists have hypothesized that exascale technology, capable of crunching more than one quintillion calculations per second, would mirror the computing power of the human brain.

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