New Breed of Supercomputer Aims for the Two Quintillion Mark
by Ayelen Flores Ruiz, age 13
There is a new type of supercomputer under construction known as an exascale supercomputer. Exascale refers to a supercomputer that can perform two quintillion operations in a second. This drastically compares with a phone which does 17 trillion operations and the human brain which does 228 trillion operations in a second. These computers can help rearrange human life.
One such new supercomputer has been built inside a data center in Aurora, Illinois, near Chicago. The computer, also called Aurora, is located in the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory. Built by Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Aurora is the size of two tennis courts and weighs 600 tons. High-powered machines like Aurora will take months to be fully operational because technicians are always on the lookout for errors, improvements, and changes. Although this process will take a long time, Aurora should be fully operating in 2024.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier was the first working exascale computer and got the title of the world’s most powerful computer. Aurora is not fully operational, tests have shown it is the second-most powerful. Other supercomputers are being built around the world. For example, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is building a $600 million exascale computer named El Capitan, which potentially could be more powerful than Aurora. Another exascale supercomputer called Dojo is being built by Tesla, which spent more than $1 billion. The United Kingdom and other places are trying to create their exclusive supercomputers. [Read More]