The US is building a $500m ‘exascale’ computer that will be the world’s most powerful
Officials claim the machine will be seven times faster than the current most powerful system.
A first: The Aurora supercomputer would be the first US computer to reach exascale performance, where a computer can do more than a quintillion calculations per second. The closest rival is a $200 million IBM system called Summit, which won the top spot among the world’s 500 most powerful computers last year.
The details: Aurora will be built by Intel at the Argonne National Laboratory, on the outskirts of Chicago. It’s scheduled to be ready in 2021.
Why? Making machines quicker at crunching data would help researchers with tasks like modeling climate change or finding new pharmaceutical drugs. The announcement must also be seen through the lens of China-US tech rivalry, particularly within the field of supercomputers.
Sign up here to our daily newsletter The Download to get your dose of the latest must-read news from the world of emerging tech.
Deep Dive
Computing
The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth
Open-source code runs on every computer on the planet—and keeps America’s critical infrastructure going. DARPA is worried about how well it can be trusted
Corruption is sending shock waves through China’s chipmaking industry
The arrests of several top semiconductor fund executives could force the government to rethink how it invests in the sector.
The hacking industry faces the end of an era
But even if NSO Group is no more, there are plenty of rivals who will rush in to take its place. And the same old problems haven’t gone away.
Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities
Companies are pushing more server farms into the hearts of population centers.
Stay connected
Illustration by Rose WongGet the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.