SoylentNews

takyon writes:

HPCwire reports:

The bottom line is that the President's FY18 budget proposes to spend $508 million on exascale-related activities. This is a 77 percent increase over the FY17 enacted levels. The intent of this funding is to put the U.S. on track to have a productive exascale system by 2021. Funding is divided between two DOE programs, the Office of Science and the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA request directs $161 million for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program and another $22 million to begin construction of the physical infrastructure for the exascale system. The Office of Science (SC) money ($347 million) would go to the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program. (See Tiffany Trader's coverage in HPCwire for a detailed look at the numbers.)

Both the NNSA and SC exascale activities will be the subject of debate as the President's FY18 budget request moves forward in Congress. However, given the cuts that were seen in the rest of the DOE budget, getting to this point could be considered a minor miracle. Getting the increases to the NNSA exascale budget was likely to be relatively easy. President Trump said he was going to increase the federal government budget's emphasis on national security and set aside about $1 billion for the NNSA. Using part of that to add to the ASC program must have been straightforward. That being said, there must have been a tremendous amount of work and planning needed to create the budget justification material.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory will deploy Summit in 2018, with an estimated 200 petaflops of performance. The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory is planning a 180 petaflop supercomputer, Aurora, to be operational by 2019.

Original Submission