The US spent $ 126 million to produce

The White House is determined to "spend heavily" to recapture the world's most powerful supercomputer seized by China last November.

US President Barack Obama has just signed a decision to budget for 2012, including the amount spent on the development of the next supercomputing system. This amount, expected to be transferred to the US Department of Energy (DOE) to research and build an " exascale " computer system.


Picture 1 of The US spent $ 126 million to produce
IBM Mira with ambition to become the world's most powerful supercomputer.

If the US Congress accepts Obama's request, DOE will receive $ 126 million to develop " exascale ". This includes $ 91 million for the Department of Energy Science offices and $ 36 million for the National Nuclear Security Bureau.

A spokesman for the US Department of Energy said the DOE spent $ 24 million in 2011 but has not achieved significant success. The Exascale system is expected to be 1,000 times faster than Tianhe-1A, the latest Chinese supercomputer ranked fastest in the world.

In 1997, ASCI Red computers from the Sandia National Labs laboratory of DOE were able to perform 1.3 trillion calculations in a second. In 2008, IBM's Roadrunner at DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory was the first computer to achieve one million billion calculations per second.

It is expected that supercomputers will continue to be researched and manufactured by IBM. And in 2012, when launched, this Mira-named machine could achieve 10 million billion calculations in a second. The device will be equipped with 750,000 IBM PowerPC A2 processor chips at 1.6GHz.

Last November, China's Tianhe-1a debuted with a speed of 2.67 million billion calculations per second and officially occupied the world's strongest supercomputer of the Jaguar Cray XT5. The machine at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge Computing Center, which was at the forefront of the world during 2011, could handle 1.75 million billion calculations.