DOE Awards $25.4 Million for Exascale Interconnect Design

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exascaleThe DOE has awarded $25.4 million in R&D contracts to five leading HPC companies to accelerate the development of next-generation supercomputers.

Under DOE’s new DesignForward initiative, AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel Federal and NVIDIA will work to advance extreme-scale, on the path to exascale, computing technology that is vital to national security, scientific research, energy security and the nation’s economic competitiveness.

Exascale computing is key to NNSA’s capability of ensuring the safety and security of our nuclear stockpile without returning to underground testing,” said Robert Meisner, director of the NNSA Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing program. “The resulting simulation capabilities will also serve as valuable tools to address nonproliferation and counterterrorism issues, as well as informing other national security decisions.”

The DesignForward contracts, which cover a two-year performance period, will support the design and evaluation of interconnect architectures for future advanced HPC architectures. Such interconnects will tie together hundreds of thousands or millions of processors, as building blocks of supercomputers to be used in studying complex problems in unprecedented detail. The DesignForward focus will be on developing interconnects that are energy efficient, have high bandwidth, and minimize the time to move data among processors.

Under the new contract, Intel will focus on interconnect architectures and implementation approaches, Cray on open network protocol standards, AMD on interconnect architectures and associated execution models, IBM on energy-efficient interconnect architectures and messaging models and NVIDIA on interconnect architectures for massively threaded processors.

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