The U.S. Department of Energy today unveiled plans to build two GPU-accelerated supercomputers – expected to deliver at least three-times greater performance than today’s most powerful system – which will move the world closer to the long-held goal of exascale computing. The supercomputers, to be installed in 2017, will be based on next-generation IBM POWER servers with NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators and NVIDIA NVLink high-speed GPU interconnect technology. They will be considerably faster than the U.S.’s current speed champ, Oak Ridge’s “Titan,” which delivers 27 peak petaflops, as well as the world’s fastest, Tianhe-2 at China’s National Super Computer Center, in Guangzhou, which delivers 55 peak petaflops. “Today’s science is tomorrow’s technology,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA. “Scientists are tackling massive challenges from quantum to global to galactic scales. Their work relies on increasingly more powerful supercomputers. Through the invention of GPU acceleration, we have paved the path to exascale supercomputing – giving scientists a tool for unimaginable discoveries.”
