Obama Wants Supercomputer That Can Mimic Brain

However, the scheme is also intended to be “executed in collaboration with industry and academia, to maximize the benefits of HPC for the United States”. Dubbed the National Strategic Computing Initiative, ultimately this will be a computer that is capable of mimicking the human brain, which apparently isn’t possible with today’s technology.

President Obama has signed an Executive Order calling for the US to significantly up its game in the supercomputer space.

Currently, the world’s fastest supercomputer sits in China, with the Tianhe-2 running at 33.86 petaflops, meaning it can perform 33.86 quadrillions arithmetic operations per second.

However it looks like President Obama does not want the US to play second-fiddle to anyone.

As reported by IEEE Spectrum, an exascale computer could be built and this week, but current systems simply aren’t tenable.

The Defense and Energy Departments along with the National Science Foundation will lead the research on the development of a new high-performance computer. “You could build an exaflop computer tomorrow, but it’d be a insane thing to do because of the cost and energy required to run it”.

The US president is of the view that high performance of next-generation computers is needed to meet increased demand for computing power and maintaining economic growth. It aims to create systems that can apply exaflops of computing power to exabytes of data, keep the US at the forefront of HPC computing and improve HPC application developer productivity.

In addition, Obama says the US must develop a “comprehensive technical and scientific approach” to extend HPC research into hardware, system software, development tools, and applications.

One of the objectives of the NSCI will be to provide a viable path over the next 15 years, even after the limits of current semiconductor technology are reached in the “post- Moore’s law era”.

The technology will be used by five national agencies – NASA, the FBI, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Homeland Security, who will be able to co-design and test the machine from its early stages to include special requirements to meet their own needs.

There was no timeline provided as to when this project will be completed, although the executive order did state that NSCI must be setup within 90 days of today and must release annual reports about its progress.