The U.S department of Energy has given NVIDIA $12M to conduct research on exascale supercomputing. Exascale computing describes a computer system capable of reaching one exaflop. For comparison, current supercomputing is still using petaflops as a performance unit(1 petaflop = or one quadrillion floating point operations per second). Today, the fastest super-computer clocks at 16 petaflops today and Exascale is 1000 times larger than petascale.
The $12M basically pays NVIDIA for 2 years of research in critical areas that would lead to building an exascale compute architecture that is more power-efficient than anything we have today. Bill Dally, NVIDIA’s Chief Scientist suggests that if one was to build an exascale computer based on Intel’s X86 architecture today, the energy required would reach 2 Gigawatt or “the entire output of the Hoover Dam” he adds.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: NVIDIA forums hacked, Scientists create molecule to keep teeth cavityproof,
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