United States In 2008, two
United States of America governmental organisations within the
US Department of Energy, the
Office of Science and the
National Nuclear Security Administration, provided funding to the Institute for Advanced Architectures for the development of an exascale supercomputer;
Sandia National Laboratory and the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory were also to collaborate on exascale designs. The technology was expected to be applied in various computation-intensive research areas, including
basic research,
engineering,
earth science,
biology,
materials science, energy issues, and national security. In January 2012,
Intel purchased the
InfiniBand product line from
QLogic for US$125 million in order to fulfill its promise of developing exascale technology by 2018. By 2012, the United States had allotted $126 million for exascale computing development. In February 2013, the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity started the Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program, which envisions a new generation of
superconducting supercomputers that operate at exascale speeds based on
superconducting logic. In December 2014 it announced a multi-year contract with IBM, Raytheon BBN Technologies and Northrop Grumman to develop the technologies for the C3 program. On 29 July 2015,
Barack Obama signed an executive order creating a
National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing. The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) hopes to build an exascale computer by 2021. On 18 March 2019, the
United States Department of Energy and
Intel announced the first exaFLOPS supercomputer would be operational at
Argonne National Laboratory by late 2022. The computer, named
Aurora is to be delivered to Argonne by Intel and
Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise), and is expected to use Intel Xe GPGPUs alongside a future Xeon Scalable CPU, and cost US$600 Million. On 7 May 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise) to build the
Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Frontier is anticipated to be fully operational in 2022 and, with a performance of greater than 1.5 exaFLOPS, should then be the world's most powerful computer. On 4 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD to build the
El Capitan supercomputer at a cost of US$600 million, to be installed at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It is expected to be used primarily (but not exclusively) for nuclear weapons modeling. El Capitan was first announced in August 2019, when the DOE and LLNL revealed the purchase of a Shasta supercomputer from Cray. El Capitan will be operational in early 2023 and have a performance of 2 exaFLOPS. It will use AMD CPUs and GPUs, with 4 Radeon Instinct GPUs per EPYC Zen 4 CPU, to speed up artificial intelligence tasks. El Capitan should consume around 40 MW of electric power. In May 2022, the United States had its first exascale supercomputer, Frontier. In June 2024, Argonne National Laboratory's
Aurora became the country's second exascale computer, followed five months later by El Capitan becoming operational.
Japan In Japan, in 2013, the
RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science began planning an exascale system for 2020, intended to consume less than 30 megawatts. In 2014,
Fujitsu was awarded a contract by RIKEN to develop a next-generation supercomputer to succeed the
K computer. The successor is called
Fugaku, and aims to have a performance of at least 1 exaFLOPS, and be fully operational in 2021. In 2015, Fujitsu announced at the
International Supercomputing Conference that this supercomputer would use processors implementing the
ARMv8 architecture with extensions it was co-designing with
ARM Limited. It was partially put into operation in June 2020 Named after Mount Fuji, Japan's tallest peak, Fugaku retained the No. 1 ranking on the Top 500 supercomputer calculation speed ranking announced on November 17, 2020, reaching a calculation speed of 442 quadrillion calculations per second, or 0.442 exaFLOPS.
China As of June 2022, China had two of the Top Ten
fastest supercomputers in the world. According to the national plan for the next generation of high performance computers and the head of the school of computing at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China was supposed to develop an exascale computer during the 13th Five-Year-Plan period (2016–2020) which would enter service in the latter half of 2020. The government of Tianjin Binhai New Area, NUDT and the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin are working on the project. After
Tianhe-1 and
Tianhe-2, the exascale successor is planned to be named Tianhe-3. As of 2023, China is reported to have two operational exascale computers; Tianhe-3 (Xingyi) and Sunway OceanLight, with a third being built. Neither are on the Top500.
European Union & United Kingdom :
See also Supercomputing in Europe In 2011, several projects aiming at developing technologies and software for exascale computing were started in the European Union. The CRESTA project (Collaborative Research into Exascale Systemware, Tools and Applications), the DEEP project (Dynamical ExaScale Entry Platform), and the project Mont-Blanc. A major European project based on exascale transition is the MaX (Materials at the Exascale) project. The Energy oriented Centre of Excellence (EoCoE) exploits exascale technologies to support carbon-free energy research and applications. In 2015, the Scalable, Energy-Efficient, Resilient and Transparent Software Adaptation (SERT) project, a major research project between the
University of Manchester and the STFC
Daresbury Laboratory in
Cheshire, was awarded c. £1million from the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The SERT project was due to start in March 2015. It will be funded by EPSRC under the Software for the Future II programme, and the project will partner with the Numerical Analysis Group (NAG), Cluster Vision and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). On 28 September 2018, the
European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) was formally established by the EU. The EuroHPC JU aims to build an exascale supercomputer by 2022/2023. The EuroHPC JU will be jointly funded by its public members with a budget of around €1 billion. The EU's financial contribution is €486 million. In 2025, the
JUPITER supercomputer hosted by
Forschungszentrum Jülich is completed, marking the first exascale supercomputer on the TOP500 list outside the United States. A second exascale supercomputer, Alice Recoque, is announced in 2023; the supercomputer will be hosted by
GENCI and located at Très Grand Centre de calcul, in the
CEA site at
Bruyères-le-Châtel, France. In March 2023 the government of the United Kingdom announced it would invest £900 million in the development of an exascale computer. This project was axed in August 2024.
Taiwan In June 2017,
Taiwan's
National Center for High-Performance Computing initiated the effort towards designing and building the first Taiwanese exascale supercomputer by funding construction of a new intermediary supercomputer based on a full technology transfer from
Fujitsu corporation of
Japan, which is currently building the fastest and most powerful
A.I. based supercomputer in
Japan. Additionally, numerous other independent efforts have been made in Taiwan with the focus on the rapid development of exascale supercomputing technology, such as
Foxconn Corporation which recently designed and built the largest and fastest supercomputer in all of Taiwan. This new
Foxconn supercomputer is designed to serve as a stepping stone in research and development towards the design and building of a state of the art exascale supercomputer.
India In 2012, the Indian Government proposed to commit US$2.5 billion to supercomputing research during the
12th five-year plan period (2012–2017). The project was to be handled by
Indian Institute of Science (IISc),
Bangalore. Additionally, it was later revealed that India plans to develop a supercomputer with processing power in the
exaFLOPS range. It will be developed by
C-DAC within the subsequent five years of approval. These supercomputers will use indigenously developed microprocessors by C-DAC in India. In 2023, in a presentation by CDAC, it plans to have a indigenously developed exascale supercomputer named Param Shankh. The Param Shankh will be powered by an indigenous 96-core, ARM architecture-based processor which has been nicknamed AUM (ॐ). == See also ==