First ever Exascale Supercomputer built in America by 2021

The next generation of supercomputers from America is here. At a ceremony attended by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and Senator Dick Durbin at Argonne National Laboratory, it was announced that the new supercomputer- Aurora will be built by Intel at Argonne to be the first of its kind in the US.

At the ceremony, Perry said: “We will use exascale computing and AI to accelerate discovery, spur ingenuity, drive innovation, and above all, we will impact all of those areas in ways that just a few years ago we couldn’t have realized that we were going to have the ability to do.”

Perry said that Aurora will be fully operational by 2021 to keep pace with China in the supercomputer race. So far, the most powerful supercomputer from China went live last year and it may beat the US in exascale computers by releasing its own in 2020. But Aurora is expected to be even more powerful- nearly 50 times than that of the Chinese one.

As an IT service, supercomputers can be powerful devices for their respective countries. Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment, and life sciences at Argonne said in an interview: “We don’t know what everybody else is doing, so we can only really talk to the plans in the United States. We know other countries are working on the path to exascale, but we don’t know precisely when they will deploy their systems.”