Last month, the US retook the supercomputing crown with Frontier, the world’s first publicly confirmed exascale machine. Now the country is interested in creating a supercomputer meant to be up to 10 times faster.
On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy issued a “request for information” to the computing industry on building next-generation supercomputers for the 2025 to 2030 timeframe.
“DOE is interested in the deployment of one or more supercomputers that can solve scientific problems 5 to 10 times faster—or solve more complex problems, such as those with more physics or requirements for higher fidelity—than the current state-of-the-art systems,” the agency wrote.
In addition to Frontier, the US is preparing two other exascale machines called Aurora and El Capitan, which are scheduled to launch in the coming months. The machines will help the US compete in the supercomputing race against China. But for the remainder of the decade, the Department of Energy is already trying to lay some groundwork for exascale systems capable of surpassing them.
The request for information calls for developing exascale machines that will maintain a power envelope of 20 to 60 Megawatts, despite the drastic increase in computing power. For perspective, the Frontier machine currently operates at 21 Megawatts.
The other priority involves looking at building “modular” supercomputers, which can be upgraded with new parts over time. “We also wish to explore the development of an approach that moves away from monolithic acquisitions toward a model for enabling more rapid upgrade cycles of deployed systems, to enable faster innovation on hardware and software,” the DOE wrote.
This would open the door to upgrading the resulting machine every 12 to 24 months, rather than building an entirely new supercomputer over the next four to five years to replace it.
“Understanding the trade-offs of these approaches is one goal of this RFI, and we invite responses to include perceived benefits and/or disadvantages of this modular upgrade approach,” the department added.
The US plans on using the next-generation supercomputers for scientific research and national security purposes. The giant machines excel at running 3D simulations that can be used to predict climate change, experiment with new drug therapies, and even test nuclear stockpiles.
The request for information goes on to ask interested companies to supply information on their product roadmaps and future technologies. This includes details of what chip nodes the companies plan on deploying for the 2025 to 2030 time frame and their plans for using chiplet-based packaging. Vendors including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are all expected to respond.
The request for information arrives as China is reportedly developing 10 exascale systems by 2025. The country already had two exascale systems up and running last year, but they were never publicly benchmarked, according to TheNextPlatform.