Intel Corporation (INTC) said that it and the U.S. Department of Energy will deliver the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States. The system being developed at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, named "Aurora," will be used to dramatically advance scientific research and discovery. The contract is valued at more than $500M and will be delivered to Argonne National Laboratory by Intel and sub-contractor Cray Inc. (CRAY) in 2021. The Aurora system's exaFLOP of performance - equal to a "quintillion" floating point computations per second - combined with an ability to handle both traditional high-performance computing and artificial intelligence will give researchers a set of tools to address scientific problems at exascale, Intel said. "Achieving exascale is imperative, not only to better the scientific community, but also to better the lives of everyday Americans," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. "Aurora and the next generation of exascale supercomputers will apply HPC and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, climate modeling and veterans' health treatments. The innovative advancements that will be made with exascale will have an incredibly significant impact on our society."
