U.S. Aims to Retake Lead in Supercomputers
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The United States is launching a push to regain the lead in the competition over who has the most powerful computer, announcing plans Wednesday to build the world’s fastest civilian computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee with the help of three private computer companies.
The team envisions a computer capable of performing 50 trillion calculations per second on a sustained basis. The record is 36 trillion calculations per second, held by a Japanese machine.
Supercomputers are used to simulate everything from climate change to forces released in a nuclear explosion.
