US announces plan for new ‘exascale’ supercomputer but timeline may fall behind China’s schedule

Project Aurora is a US$500 million Intel-powered system and one of the most expensive computers ever made in the US

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An employee walks next to supercomputers at The National Supercomputer Centre in Jinan, Shandong province, on October 17, 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE

Li Taoin Shenzhen

Published: 10:54am, 19 Mar 2019Updated: 12:55am, 20 Mar 2019

The supercomputing race between the world’s two largest economies escalated on Monday after the US unveiled plans for its first machine to cross the “exascale” performance threshold by 2021, putting it roughly a year behind a similar plan from China.

Project Aurora is a US$500 million Intel-powered system and one of the most expensive computers ever made in the US. It will be built at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago with the aim of performing a quintillion calculations per second when it is officially put into operation in 2021, the US Department of Energy said on Monday.

China is also planning a multibillion-dollar investment to upgrade its supercomputer infrastructure by 2020 to regain leadership after the US took top spot for the fastest supercomputer in 2018, ending China’s five-year dominance, the South China Morning Post reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Exascale computing refers to machines capable of at least a quintillion (or a billion) calculations per second.

China’s planned investment, funded by the central government and respective local governments, aims to upgrade three existing facilities to the latest exascale computing machines. The Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, the National Supercomputing Centre of Tianjin and National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen are expected to complete their upgrade to exascale computing machines in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively, as part of efforts by China for “continuous leadership” in supercomputing, said the Post report.