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
Learning to code isn’t enough
Historically, learn-to-code efforts have provided opportunities for the few, but new efforts are aiming to be inclusive.
IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer
The company wants to make large-scale quantum computers a reality within just 10 years.
The inside story of New York City’s 34-year-old social network, ECHO
Stacy Horn set out to create something new and very New York. She didn’t expect it to last so long.
Delivering a quantum future
Innovations require engineering breakthroughs and focus on real computational problems.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.