Obama Calls For U.S. To Build World’s Fastest Supercomputer
China's Tianhe-2 is the world's fastest supercomputer... but not for long. Sam Churchill via Flickr, CC by 2.0 Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order to establish the National Strategic Computing Initiative, intended to advance American research efforts that require high-capacity computing (HCC). The main thrust of the program, according to a blog post from the White House, would be to create the world’s fastest supercomputer, which would be 20 times faster than today’s fastest supercomputer, China’s Tianhe-2. The machine would be called an exascale computer--capable of making a billion billion—or one exaflop—calculations per second. HCC has already enabled scientists to run simulations and experiments faster than ever, computing outcomes based on millions of data points. So far it has created elaborate models in the fields of anthropology, weather prediction, neuroscience and biology....