US Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, announced that six leading US technology companies will receive funding from the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as part of its new PathForward program, accelerating the research necessary to deploy the nation’s first exascale supercomputers.
The companies awarded funding through this program are Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Cray, HPE and IBM.
‘Continued US leadership in high performance computing is essential to our security, prosperity, and economic competitiveness as a nation,’ said Secretary Perry. ‘These awards will enable leading US technology firms to marshal their formidable skills, expertise, and resources in the global race for the next stage in supercomputing—exascale-capable systems.’
The companies will receive funding for research and development to maximise the energy efficiency and overall performance of future large-scale supercomputers, which are critical for US leadership in areas such as national security, manufacturing, industrial competitiveness, and energy and earth sciences.
The $258 million in funding will be allocated over a three-year contract period, with companies providing additional funding amounting to at least 40 percent of their total project cost, bringing the total investment to at least $430 million.
‘The PathForward program is critical to the ECP’s co-design process, which brings together expertise from diverse sources to address the four key challenges: parallelism, memory and storage, reliability and energy consumption,’ ECP Director Paul Messina said.
‘The work funded by PathForward will include development of innovative memory architectures; higher-speed interconnects, improved reliability systems, and approaches for increasing computing power without prohibitive increases in energy demand. It is essential that private industry play a role in this work going forward: advances in computer hardware and architecture will contribute to meeting all four challenges.’
