Obama Announces National Strategic Computing Initiative

By Bio-IT World Staff

July 30, 2015 | Yesterday President Obama has signed an executive order creating the National Strategic Computing Initiative. The Initiative aims to bring together several government agencies including the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation to pursue exascale computing.

"The NSCI will spur the creation and deployment of computing technology at the leading edge, helping to advance Administration priorities for economic competiveness, scientific discovery, and national security," according to a White House fact sheet.

"The NSCI seeks to drive the convergence of compute-intensive and data-intensive systems, while also increasing performance overall. Government agencies will work with computer vendors to create advanced systems for applications involving combinations of modeling, simulation, and data analytics. Government research programs will develop new approaches to hardware, system architectures, and programming tools. Government agencies will also foster the transition of these technologies from research to deployment."

Chasing Exascale

Exascale computing has been the next big thing since 2008, when an IBM system reached petascale computing. Twice a year the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers is published, and for the past five lists the Chinese system, Tianhe-2, has topped the world's supercomputers. Oak Ridge National Laboratories' Titan supercomputer has been in the #2 spot since Tianhe-2 pulled past it on the June 2013 list. Tianhe-2 achieved 33.86 petaflop/s on the latest list (quadrillions of calculations per second on the Linpack benchmark).

An exaflop--the next milestone--is about 1,000 petaflop/s.

The US and China have been racing toward exascale computing since late 2012, though the race has been stalled for the past two years. The speed of neither of the top two systems has changed since June 2013.

In April 2013 the federal R&D budget did not set goals for exascale computing, but gave small gains to the Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Program and analysts predicted exascale could be acheived by 2020. In late 2014, William Harrod, reserch division director for the DOE program, predicted that the speed would be reached by 2023.