Department of Energy to overhaul supercomputing with $23 million investment in emerging US tech

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New tech could help supercomputers to perform their best

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The US Department of Energy (DoE) has announced a program that will see $23 million of funding funneled into supercomputing research and investment.

The New Frontiers initiative will look to address a number of bottlenecks in current supercomputer performance at US institutions, such as bandwidth and power consumption.

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Power equals performance

Supercomputers have been boasting impressive metrics for some time, with the Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora system passing the one quintillion floating point operations per second (exaFLOP) mark earlier this year. However this peak performance is hampered by restriction in bandwidth between each supercomputing chip, as well as the power required to sustain exaFLOP performance.

Leading the New Frontier program will be HPC Systems Engineer, Christopher Zimmer, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Speaking on the power consumption of supercomputing, Zimmer said, “With Dennard scaling long dead and the slowing of Moore's law, we're seeing technologies critical to HPC consuming more power that partially offset increases in application performance due to improvements in silicon process nodes and improved packaging techniques.”

There has been no disclosure on which organizations or technologies will see investment from the New Frontier program, emerging technologies set to enter production within the next 5 to 10 years, such as improved packaging and photonics interconnects, are likely to be key in addressing bottlenecks.

In a statement on the announcement of the New Frontier program, Ceren Susut, associate director of the DoE's Office of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research said, “There is a growing consensus that urgent action is needed to address the array of bottlenecks in advanced computing, including energy efficiency, advanced memory, interconnects, and programmability to maintain economic leadership and national security.”

Via The Register

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