World's Most Powerful Supercomputer To Be Built For AI Development Support

Arnav Dhar - May 09, 2019

As the world's biggest nation is competing in both AI technology and computing capabilities, the U.S. is investing more than $1 billion to build new exascale systems.

AMD and American supercomputer firm Cray will work together to build a supercomputer named Frontier. The U.S. Department of Energy is investing a budget of $600 mil. on the project.

This new machine will be able to complete 1.5 quintillions (1 quintillion equals 10^18) calculations per sec. Along with Aurora, this is one of the 2 exascale machines to be built by the U.S. DoE. for the 2021 plan. (exascale means a computing system which can complete at least 1 quintillion calculations per sec).

Supercomputer Demonstration — This new machine will be able to complete 1.5 quintillions (1 quintillion equals 10^18) calculations per sec.

Frontier is predicted to tenfold the speed of our current most powerful supercomputer a.k.a Summit. Once having been completed in Oak Ridge National Lab, it will be used to accomplish the complicated issues in advanced areas such as AI technology, medical research, simulating climate models.

According to Cray CTO and senior VP Steve Scott in a press release, the Frontier will integrate both the technology of AMD and Cray, which makes it powerful enough to further boost the developing levels in many scientific and technological fields such as AI.

Being the remaining one in U.S. future exascale supercomputers, Aurora is also another project of the DoE which is developed by Santa Clara-based Intel Corp. While Frontier is capable of completing 1.5 quintillion calculations per sec, Aurora will trail not far behind with a computing ability of 1 quintillion calculations per sec. The project reportedly costs $500 mil.

As the U.S. government is urging to develop AI technology, the computing abilities of the DoE will be vital. This is recently pointed out by DoE secretary Rick Perry.

Despite its ambition to be the dominant force in international artificial intelligence and computing technology, the U.S. is now facing great competitions from other rival nations including China, EU, and Japan. While China's number of most powerful supercomputers is overwhelming with a whopping 227 out of 500, the U.S. takes the 2nd place with a far fewer number of 109 machines.