The US Department of Energy (DoE) has granted $18m to NVIDIA under its "FastFoward 2" programme which is designed to speed up the development of next-generation supercomputers.
The grant is a part of the $100m funding announced by US secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz to support research and development of supercomputing technologies that are both affordable and energy efficient.
According to NVIDIA, power consumption is a major roadblock for future systems and the programme focuses towards making systems more energy efficient.
The DoE aims to develop exascale system by 2020 which consumes less than 20 megawatts of power.
However, exascale computing is seen as a challenge in supercomputing world, but NVIDIA develops heterogeneous computing model which is expected to help overcome the challenge.
DoE also aims to have systems that operate at quintillions of petaflop (floating point calculations per second) which is expected to be 30-60 times faster than today’s leading supercomputers.
NVIDIA researchers along with DoE application developers are also expected to work on parallel algorithm development and optimisation for DoE applications.
Secretary Moniz said. "High-performance computing is an essential component of the science and technology portfolio required to maintain U.S. competitiveness and ensure our economic and national security."
Apart from the $100m funding, Moniz also announced $325m contract for development of supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.
