Starting in 2021, the Chicagoland area will be home to the fastest supercomputer in the world.
The U.S. Department of Energy is funding a $500 million project to build the world's fastest supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne will work with chip maker Intel and computer company Cray on the supercomputer, which will be named Aurora.
Once the supercomputer is operational in 2021, it will be able to do more than one quintillion calculations a second, making it the most powerful supercomputer available and give researchers an "unprecedented set of tools to address scientific problems at exascale," the DOE said in a news release.
“Aurora and the next generation of exascale supercomputers will apply HPC and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, climate modeling and veterans’ health treatments," U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said in a statement. "The innovative advancements that will be made with exascale will have an incredibly significant impact on our society.”
The supercomputer will be used to dramatically advance scientific research and discovery, the DOE said, allowing for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence research to be conducted at a scale never before seen.
The device will also help put Chicago at the center of artificial intelligence and supercomputing, as Aurora will tackle major initiatives from healthcare to climate change research.
“Argonne’s Aurora system is built for next-generation artificial intelligence and will accelerate scientific discovery by combining high-performance computing and artificial intelligence to address real world problems, such as improving extreme weather forecasting, accelerating medical treatments, mapping the human brain, developing new materials and further understanding the universe – and that is just the beginning," Argonne Director Paul Kearns said in a statement.
