The US Will Get Its First Exaflop SuperComputer By 2021

Saanvi Araav - Mar 20, 2019

American Cray and Intel is teaming up to build Aurora - an exaflop supercomputer.

With all the S10 and iPhone these days we have, you might think that we already have a very powerful computing device at our disposal. But if we just take a closer look at the supercomputers, our amazing smartphones has no stance for comparison. Let's take a look at the extreme supercomputer named "Aurora".

American Cray and Intel

Just recently, American Cray ( a supercomputing company ) has partnered up with Intel to build one of those huge machines, with the price tag of more than 500 million dollars.

The two companies have just come into agreement on a contract to build a most powerful ever supercomputer for the client - US Department of Energy. This whole project comes under the name of program "Aurora", with this project they will construct a system of exascale computing for Argonne National Laboratory. They expect to deliver this machine by 2021.

For those who are not familiar with the whole technical part, one exaflop is equal to one thousand petaflops. That means a computer with the capacity of one exaflop will be capable of doing up to one quintillion calculations each second.

Making it simpler for you to understand, a normal desktop at your home these days will be capable of around one hundred gigaflops. So one thousand gigaflops will be one teraflop, and with one thousand teraflops, we have a petaflop.

Exaflop Computer

Today, those are considered as the most powerful supercomputers in the world are only capable of the level of petaflops. Then we also have to ask the question of why Argonne Lab needs such a powerful machine? So we figured that they do have needs for such a powerful machine. They intend to use this supercomputer for a variety of tasks from researching planetary science, renewable energy, climate change and many other.

The Aurora supercomputer will be the first of its kind in the US for sure, maybe even the first exaflop computer in the world. In the meanwhile, China is also developing its own system and expect to put it to use by 2020.