By 2021, the United States will have the world’s fastest supercomputer built. This is according to the country’s department of energy.

 

Supercomputer manufacturer Cray and chip designer company AMD will build the machine, called Frontier. They will build it for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA. The computer will perform a range of tasks, including advanced calculations in climate and nuclear research.

 

According to the Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry,

“Frontier will accelerate innovation in AI by giving American researchers world-class data and computing resources to ensure the next great inventions are made in the United States.”

 

 

Once constructed, the machine will be the most advanced example of “exascale computing.” This is the next generation of the computing capacity where processing power is measured in quintillions of calculations per second or exaflops. A quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) is a number counting with eighteen zeros behind it.

 

AMD says the Frontier will have as much processing power as the next 160 fastest supercomputers combined. They say it will be able to handle an incredibly huge amount of data. The bandwidth will be 24,000,000 times greater than the average home internet connection. It will also be capable of processing 100,000 HD films in one second. The machine will contain 90 miles of cables and will take up 7,300 square feet of space. That is approximately two basketball courts.

 

 

Earlier in 2019, the Department of Energy announced a similar project with the Aurora supercomputer. It is being constructed by Intel and Cray at the Argonne National Laboratory. Aurora might be the first exascale supercomputer in the world. However, Frontier will reportedly have an even greater processing power.

 

China too may have its own exascale supercomputer by the year 2020 even before America. China is also the world’s leading owner of supercomputers. The country currently has 227 of the world’s fastest computers. The US has only 109.

 

Intel currently has the most supercomputer chips in the world.