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posted by martyb on Friday April 28 2017, @01:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the BIG-iron dept.

Here is a status update on the U.S. path to exascale (as well as some details about Chinese, Japanese, and EU efforts):

Paul Messina, director of the U.S. Exascale Computing Project, provided a wide-ranging review of ECP's evolving plans last week at the HPC User Forum in Santa Fe, NM. The biggest change, of course, is ECP's accelerated timetable with delivery of the first exascale machine now scheduled for 2021. While much of the material covered by Messina wasn't new there were a few fresh details on the long awaited Path Forward hardware contracts and on progress-to-date in other ECP fronts.

"We have selected six vendors to be primes, and in some cases they have had other vendors involved in their R&D requirements. [We have also] been working on detailed statements of work because the dollar amounts are pretty hefty, the approval process [reaches] high up in the Department of Energy," said Messina of the Path Forward awards. Five of the contracts are signed and the sixth is not far off. Even his slide had the announcement to be ready by COB April 14, 2017. "It would have been great to announce them at this HPC User Forum but it was not meant to be." He said the announcements will be made public soon.

The duration of the ECP project has been shortened to seven years from ten years although there's a 12-month schedule contingency built in to accommodate changes, said Messina. Interestingly, during the Q&A, Messina was asked about U.S. willingness to include 'individuals' not based in the U.S. in the project. The question was a little ambiguous as it wasn't clear if 'individuals' was intended to encompass foreign interests broadly, but Messina answered directly, "[For] people who are based outside the U.S. I would say the policy is they are not included."

The plan is for the U.S. to have a system capable of a peak of 1 exaflops by 2021, and sustained by 2023. Power consumption is intended to be around 20-30 MW, and each system should cost somewhere from $300-500 million (not counting related R&D).

This slide lists some expected applications for an exascale supercomputer.

Here is the project's website.


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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:32AM

    by anubi (2828) on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:32AM (#501433) Journal

    How many megabytes will it need to print "Hello, World!" on the display?

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]