Congress Tells Energy Dept. To Develop 'Exascale' Computers In 10 Years

Congress is directing the Energy Department to take the next decade to develop a new class of supercomputers capable of a quintillion operations per second to model nuclear weapons explosions, according to language in the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act passed by the House last week, with a Senate vote expected this week.

Department officials believe they could develop exascale supercomputers within 10 years, according to estimates offered at an Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee meeting in Denver last month.

The exascale supercomputers will operate at a speed 1,000 times faster than the current record holder,  a machine developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology that performs just under 34 quadrillion calculations per second, William Harrod, an ASCR division director told the conference.