USA Plans To Produce The Fastest Supercomputer Called Discovery, Surpassing The Frontier By 3-5 Times

The US Department of Energy is on its mission to develop the world's fastest supercomputer called 'Discovery' which will be 3 to 5 times faster than the existing Frontier supercomputer.

The battle of building the fastest supercomputer has escalated with the US Department of Energy (DOE) announcing the development of the fastest-ever supercomputer, which will surpass the existing fastest supercomputer, Frontier by several times. The US DOE just released a tender aiming to complete the production of the new supercomputer, 'Discovery' by the end of 2027 or early 2028.

Currently, the fastest supercomputer Frontier is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which can produce a theoretical performance of 1.3ExaFLOPS. It boasts a whopping 8,699,904 cores and is currently at Rank 1 in the top500 since May 2022. The 'Discovery' is said to reach up to 6.5ExaFLOPS of theoretical performance, reaching new heights in the world of supercomputers.

Supercomputers are crucial for the US national security and helps it in its military technology development. The Discovery will take care of the advanced loads, including AI and machine learning while offering significantly better power efficiency. While DOE stated that it will be 3-5 times stronger than the Frontier, the exact performance uplift is still unspecified.

The director of the ORNL Computing and Computing Science Laboratory, Georgia Tourassi, said: “Discovery will enable the scientific community to simulate the real world with new levels of detail. It will help us study challenging issues that cannot be easily explored by experiment, observation, or theory alone. ”

This comes at a time when there are rumors about China having surpassed the Frontier by almost 3-4 times with their undisclosed supercomputer. Jack Dongarra, the co-founder of Top 500 said: "The Chinese have machines that are faster" as reported by Wall Street Journal a few days ago. These are the Sunway and Tianhe-3 supercomputers, about which we have limited information on their performance since China wants to keep it secretive. Still, it's expected that the Sunway machine has about 39 million cores, quadrupling the number of cores present on the Frontier.

Not much info about its performance is known but the US DOE has prepared its plans to reach the top position once again with the Discovery.

News Source: mydrivers