F-22Raptor
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2014
- Messages
- 16,980
- Reaction score
- 3
- Country
- Location
The US Department of Energy is looking to vendors that will help build supercomputers up to 10 times faster than the recently inaugurated Frontier exascale system to come on stream between 2025 and 2030, and even more powerful systems than that for the 2030s.
These details were disclosed in a request for information (RFI) issued by the DoE for computing hardware and software vendors, system integrators and others to "assist the DoE national laboratories (labs) to plan, design, commission, and acquire the next generation of supercomputing systems in the 2025 to 2030 time frame."
Vendors have until the end of July to respond.
For this RFI, the DoE says it is interested in the deployment of one or more supercomputers that can solve scientific problems five to 10 times faster than current state-of-the-art systems "or solve more complex problems, such as those with more physics or requirements for higher fidelity."
The current state of the art is perhaps best represented by the Frontier exascale systeminstalled in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was declared operational at the end of May and clocked at 1.102 Linpack exaFLOPS of compute power, but which is expected to hit a peak theoretical performance in excess of 2 exaFLOPS in future.
In line with this, the DoE states that its rough estimate – based upon trends covering the past 20 years – includes traditional HPC systems at the 10-20 exaFLOPS level or beyond in the 2025+ time frame, and 100+ exaFLOPS and beyond in the 2030+ time frame, which it expects to be delivered "through hardware and software acceleration mechanisms."
Any such supercomputer will be expected to operate within a power envelope of 20-60MW, according to the DoE. For comparison, the Frontier system already consumes about 20MW, and can apparently hit a peak of over 30MW.
Systems should also be "sufficiently resilient" to hardware and software failures to minimize requirements for user intervention.
Interestingly, the DoE says that it is seeking to move away from "monolithic acquisitions" towards a model that would allow more rapid upgrade cycles of deployed systems to enable faster innovation on hardware and software.
www.theregister.com
These details were disclosed in a request for information (RFI) issued by the DoE for computing hardware and software vendors, system integrators and others to "assist the DoE national laboratories (labs) to plan, design, commission, and acquire the next generation of supercomputing systems in the 2025 to 2030 time frame."
Vendors have until the end of July to respond.
For this RFI, the DoE says it is interested in the deployment of one or more supercomputers that can solve scientific problems five to 10 times faster than current state-of-the-art systems "or solve more complex problems, such as those with more physics or requirements for higher fidelity."
The current state of the art is perhaps best represented by the Frontier exascale systeminstalled in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was declared operational at the end of May and clocked at 1.102 Linpack exaFLOPS of compute power, but which is expected to hit a peak theoretical performance in excess of 2 exaFLOPS in future.
In line with this, the DoE states that its rough estimate – based upon trends covering the past 20 years – includes traditional HPC systems at the 10-20 exaFLOPS level or beyond in the 2025+ time frame, and 100+ exaFLOPS and beyond in the 2030+ time frame, which it expects to be delivered "through hardware and software acceleration mechanisms."
Any such supercomputer will be expected to operate within a power envelope of 20-60MW, according to the DoE. For comparison, the Frontier system already consumes about 20MW, and can apparently hit a peak of over 30MW.
Systems should also be "sufficiently resilient" to hardware and software failures to minimize requirements for user intervention.
Interestingly, the DoE says that it is seeking to move away from "monolithic acquisitions" towards a model that would allow more rapid upgrade cycles of deployed systems to enable faster innovation on hardware and software.
US seeks exascale systems 10 times faster than current kit
China claims to have 10 in the pipeline and may pull ahead in HPC arms race
www.theregister.com
