U.S. to spend $325 million on building two supercomputers

The U.S government is funding a big leap forward in supercomputers.

The U.S Department of Energy announced on Friday that it will spend $325 million to create two new supercomputers, according to Reuters. Another $100 million would also be spent for research into highly advanced supercomputing. Parts from companies including Mellanox, Nvidia, and IBM will go into the new supercomputers.

The agency is expecting the two supercomputers to have computing speeds of at least 150 petaflops each and in service by 2017, according to ComputerWorld. In comparison, China’s supercomputer runs at 34 petaflops. Continents and nations including Europe and Japan are also putting money into such systems.

Reuters reported that each supercomputer will be made in Tennessee at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who call their project “Summit”, and California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with their project called “Sierra”.

Oak Ridge already has a supercomputer called the Titan, ComputerWorld reported. It is the second-ranked system worldwide, and its power usage runs around 10 megawatts. Summit will have the same power usage, but is expected to run five times more quickly than the lab’s current supercomputer.