Uncle Sam bungs rich tech giants quarter of a billion bucks for exascale super R&D The US government has dangled $258m in funding in front of six American tech giants to encourage the development of exascale supercomputer systems. Uncle Sam wants at least one exascale machine powered up on American soil by 2021, and in production by 2022. A second system should also be arriving around that time, ideally. By …
but we are unlikely to find out, as 498 of the top 500 supercomputers run on Linux (from what I am given to understand, the other 2 on Unix) systems....
Henri
I wonder if there's anything in the rumour that Uncle Sam is funding this because the fastest not-so-public computer, which might be spending its days at Ft Meade, has seen its once overwhelming superiority eaten away during the last 5-7 years?
If there doubts now emerging about the future practicality and effectiveness of quantum computing for cryptanalysis (which is also speculative), it makes sense to widen the resource net if you want to preserve your supercomputer advantage.
It would be interesting to know more, especially w.r.t features for crunching astronomically large numbers ....
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China may be behind now but it is well ahead in spend and manpower. News of their encryption breakthrough reflects the massive commitment Beijing is making. I was in China last week at a science institute and their commitment of resources is incredible. I read the Aztlan Protocol a few years back, it contained a warning for 2032, which seems more possible now than it did then.
«China may be behind now but it is well ahead in spend and manpower. » Not so sure that China can be considered to be «behind» in super computing ; according to the Top500 website, as of November 2016, both China and the United States had 171 systems among the top 500, with the former having the two fastest....
But of course, it's all piracy on the part of the Chinese (and no piracy on the part of the US) ; everybody knows that Chinese people are constitutionally incapable of performing original work, now don't we ?...
(Sarcasm warning)
Henri
When Cray was actually run by Seymour Cray the first super computers went into
NSA (or "Customer X" as they were known to his former employers)
US National Laboratories IE Nuclear weapons design and build
US Weather Service. Weather & climate simulation.
Top tip.
Make sure you're machine can count all the ones in an n bit word in log2 n time.
Mine's the one with Reingold, Nievergelt and Deo's "Combinatorial Algorithms: Theory & Practice," which describes, but does not explicitly list, such an algorithm.
They need to yank IBM out of this group, as they have no products nor services that qualify them to produce anything, on this scale. Watson isn't even AI. It's just badly run automation that is all hype and no byte. HPE Kills IBM, in this space. Lenovo can't be included, because they are a Chinese Company. Besides, IBM is sacking Server Hardware Support Staff, so there won't be anyone to provide support for these and Lenovo Server Products, pretty soon.
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