The US government, particularly the Department of Energy (DOE) is racing to build the world’s fastest computer. They want to beat their record-breaking machine, Frontier. The new supercomputer, called Discovery, is expected to be finished by the end of 2027 or early 2028 and is expected to be 3-5 times faster than Frontier.
The current champion, Frontier, sits at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This monster has 8,699,904 cores and can crunch numbers at a mind-boggling 1.3 ExaFLOPS. It’s been the top dog since May 2022. But the US is aiming for a new record-breaker, Discovery, which could hit a staggering 6.5 ExaFLOPS.
Supercomputers are key to US national security and military tech. The Discovery machine will handle tough jobs like AI and machine learning while using less power. But while it’s expected to be much faster than the current champ, Frontier, we don’t know the exact speed boost yet.
While talking about Discovery, Georgia Tourassi, the director of the ORNL Computing and Computing Science Laboratory said:
Discovery will enable the scientific community to simulate the real world with new levels of detail. It will help us study challenging issues that cannot be easily explored by experiment, observation, or theory alone.
There are whispers that China might have already built supercomputers that are three or four times faster than the US’s best one, Frontier. These are called Sunway and Tianhe-3, but we don’t know much about them because China is keeping them secret. But we think the Sunway might have four times as many cores as Frontier, with a whopping 39 million.