NVIDIA distributed a press release in which it reported that it had become one of six companies that received funding from the US Department of Energy for research on HPC (high-performance computing). The other five project participants are AMD, Cray, HPE, IBM and Intel. The project to develop the Exacle Computing Project will cost the Ministry $ 258 million. In addition, each of the project participants will invest in the development up to 40% of its own funds, which will increase the project cost to $ 430 million.
Subsequently, the project participants will be able to implement their developments in their own products. NVIDIA company , for example, will use the development in the creation of graphics processors, which will be released after the introduction of the GPU on the Volta architecture. On Volta, we will remind, two supercomputers Summit and Sierra which start-up is planned in 2018 will be based.
"The ECP PathForward program is aimed at finding solutions that maximize energy efficiency with the greatest possible performance for future supercomputers intended for applications in areas such as national security, production and energy research."
What NVIDIA did not mention in the press release is that today China is the most powerful supercomputer - the Sunway TaihuLight system on its own processors created in this country. The peak performance of Sunway TaihuLight reaches 124.5 petaflops. Also, China promises to create an ex-supercomputer supercomputer a year earlier than the US - already in 2020. However, the energy efficiency of Chinese systems is lower than that of American systems. The new project of the Ministry of Energy is also designed to create the most energy efficient system, and not just the most productive one. It is expected that the exaflop supercomputer will consume 20-30 megawatts, whereas the current element base allows to create a system of similar performance with consumption at the level of 100 megawatts.