National Center for Computational Sciences

The race is on to develop a new generation of far more powerful supercomputers that could help solve some of the world’s most vexing problems.

Exascale supercomputers, expected to appear by 2018, could, for example, play a significant role in efforts to combat climate change or develop ultra-long-life batteries for powering automobiles. Scientists also expect exascale systems to help them come up with processes for creating biofuels from weeds rather than corn.

Much of the work at various national labs to design and develop the new systems is funded by corporations that hope their IT operations can take advantage of the new technologies.

For example, the next generation of supercomputers could be used to solve big programming problems and allow for the development of a new generation of scientific and business applications.

The need for exascale systems, and the difficulties developers face in trying to boost hardware performance without soaking up excessive megawatts of power, was widely discussed among many of the estimated 11,000 people who gathered last month in Portland, Ore., for the SC09 supercomputing conference.

“There are serious exascale-class problems that just cannot be solved in any reasonable amount of time with the computers that we have today,” said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Continue reading at Computer World.