The United States has allocated $ 600 million to build the world's fastest supercomputer and its two Exascale computers, the Frontier, which is due to be operational by 2021 for the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Frontier has processing capacity of up to 1.5 exaFLOPS, equivalent to 1 billion calculations per second, and is being built by AMD chip maker and Cray.
The faster processing capacity of a giant computer will be used for a range of tasks, including prediction of climate change, cyclone forecasting, development of new drugs, advanced calculations in areas such as nuclear and climate research, fusion power simulation and combustion engine simulation , Simulations of the universe and galaxies.
To illustrate, if every person on Earth performs one calculation per second, we need more than six years to do the same number of calculations that a Frontier can do in a second.
"The unique Frontier performance guarantees our country's ability to lead the world in science, which improves life and brings economic prosperity to all Americans and the world," said Rick Perry, US Energy Secretary in a press release.
"Frontier accelerates innovation in AI by providing US researchers with world-class data and computing resources to ensure that the next great inventions are made in the United States."
"Frontier has a processing power that exceeds the processing capacity of the 160 most powerful computers together, and is capable of handling an amazing amount of data, with a 24 million times greater bandwidth than the average home Internet connection, making it able to download 100 A HD movie in HD.
The giant computer does not necessarily mean that the United States is the largest computing power in the world. China is expected to have its own Exascale supercomputer by 2020 - a year before the United States gets its computer.
China is a world leader in the number of computers, with 227 of the world's fastest computers, compared with 109 computers in the United States.
The Department of Energy has selected AMD for a number of reasons, including the performance of its processors, and its recent success in designing semiconductor chips for Microsoft and Sony.
The computer occupies up to 7,300 square feet - roughly the size of two basketball courts - and has 90 miles of cables, and about 5,900 gallons of water in the minute needs to be cooled.
Frontier uses dozens of AMD's custom EPYC CPUs, each connected to four units of Radeon Instinct's graphics processing modules.
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