The US Department of Energy has awarded a $325 million contract to IBM to build two high-performance computers that are likely to be the world’s most powerful when they are completed in 2017. Both machines will have a peak processing speed of at least 150 petaflops—five to seven times faster than the current top US computers. (A petaflop is 1015 floating point calculations per second.) They will be installed at national laboratories, one at Oak Ridge and one at Lawrence Livermore.
A third contract, for a supercomputer with comparable performance, is expected to be awarded within months to a different vendor. That machine will be installed at Argonne National Laboratory. In addition to the IBM award, DOE has announced a $100 million contract to five US companies to develop technologies that will be needed for affordable and energy-efficient machines as DOE moves toward its goal of exascale (1000 petaflops)...
