President Barrack Obama ordered the creation of a supercomputer that will be 20 times faster than the computer that holds the current record for being the fastest of its kind. The said project is said to go online by 2025.
The White House's executive order that was issued by Obama on July 29, Wednesday, will create the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), the White House Press Office published. A group of experts will research and build what we hope would be the first machine that can hit 1 exaflop, which translates to 1,000 petaflops.
The initiative will draw on the strengths of departments and agencies to move the Federal government into a position that sharpens, develops, and streamlines a wide range of new 21st century applications. Basically, it will be designed to advance core technologies to solve difficult computational problems and foster increased use of the new capabilities in the public and private sectors.
The attempt is, also, for the computer to help provide solutions to the challenges that humanity is facing today such as modeling the Himalaya watershed, determining genes on a molecular level, understanding the formation of hurricanes, and having an in-depth look at the dynamic of brain synapses.
Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2) housed at China's National University of Defense Technology in Guangzhou holds the record for being the fastest supercomputer reportedly doing 34 or 55 petaflops, Extreme Tech reported. Each petaflop is equal to 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per sec.
The executive order is the latest in Obama's many attempts to keep up with the supercomputer arms race between the United States, China, and Japan who are consistently trading positions in the Top 500 list of the world's list of fastest machines.