Obama Wants Exascale Computing

President Obama submitted in his 2012 budget $126 million for the development of Exaflop Scale Supercomputing. An exaflop is a million trillion calculations per second or a quintillion, and is a thousand times faster than the current Petaflop supercomputers which are a million billion calculations per second. If these machines become a reality it will change everything from the sciences to commerical applications, to developing faster industrial processes. These are the true engines of the information age to aid the next industrial revolution. The Chinese are racing toward this same thing, however, the Republicans in the congress are threatening to kill the funding. To compete with the world we need extreme thinking to stay ahead.

 

To compete with the world we need to get rid of (G)reedy (O)ne (P)ercenters party.

 

I can understand your feelings toward the other party, however, we must somehow come together as a country to compete with a very competitive world. I worry about this for my own child and someday grandchildren.

 

sorry but I can't go with this.


126 million? do you know what we could use for this?
a cure for cancer?
cure for Alzheimer?
an easier cure for AIDS?
funding for children to go to college?

 

That $126 million just goes to the Department of Energy for the development of this supercomputer. It will not benefit any other companies, they would have to invest to create their own supercomputers which is not possible. Plus, the difference between the calculation speeds makes no difference since we as humans can process the information only so fast. So what if we're able to to detect a hurricane .000001 seconds faster? We still have the same slow process to notify people. This is nothing more than a chest thumping exercise with China.

 

Make it happen BO. You have a second chance to make this country competitive again, despite the naysayers. If we have let the naysayers rule the day we would have never had the Intercontinental Railway System built, the National Highway System, the Apollo Space Program, the Manhatten Project, Commercial Aviation etc...... Let the naysayers be damned. Be ruthless BO. Govenment investments do work as a spinoff to business and industries.

 

Meet Titan:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/high...ful-science-machine-world-titan-supercomputer

This machine was just recently released. It will be the last petaflop supercomputer. The next level will be an exascale machine. Medical research will be it's primary role in protein folding research. President Obama want research to go beyond even exascale machines (zettaflop as the next level). Imagine in 40 years from now a laptop computer having the power of petaflop computing like the current gigaflop for laptops today was for supercomputing a few decades ago.