Whatever your political stance may be, there is no denying that President Barack Obama is probably the most tech-savvy leader that has ever graced the Oval Office. From pushing wireless broadband penetration to beefing up the nation’s infrastructure with super-fast trains, Obama’s tech agenda wants to ensure that the U.S. is hurdled into the 21st century with a bang instead of a whimper. Now Computerworld reports that Obama has pledged $126 million to the exascale research which is considered to be the next step in supercomputing. The Department of Energy will use that money to develop an exascale system by 2020 which will be 1,000 times more powerful than today’s most powerful supercomputer, the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-1A. An exaflop is said to have the power to accurately simulate how a human cell works to better predict future weather patterns. At one quintillion calculations per second, the juice required to run an exascale system is regarded to be around 100 million cores. Not too proud of your new quad-core rig any more, are you? The funding allows the DoE to be right on schedule with the scheduled flop-breaking barrier that occurs every 10 years or so (the petaflop barrier was broken in 2008). Ken Jennigs better challenge Watson to a rematch soon while there still is hope…
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