PNNL helping to design tomorrow's exascale supercomputers

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Supercomputers help design automobiles and aircraft, create new medical drugs and discover the mysteries of the universe. Now, in a column for the Tri-City Herald, the director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Steve Ashby, introduces a new national collaboration to take supercomputers to the next level of performance.

Supercomputers help design automobiles and aircraft, create new medical drugs and discover the mysteries of the universe. Now, in a column for the Tri-City Herald, the director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Steve Ashby, introduces a new national collaboration to take supercomputers to the next level of performance.

Under leadership from the Department of Energy, the Exascale Computing Project seeks to deliver a computer by 2021 that can perform one quintillion — or a billion billion — calculations per second. This is like every person in the United States harnessing the collective power of 300 million PCs to solve a single problem. And, it's 10 times faster than the current record holder in China.

Read more at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Image: The Seapearl compute cluster, instrumented with hundreds of power and temperature sensors, provides researchers a unique testbed for studying these important parameters with great precision on a large scale. (Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)