U.S. government spending $425 million to build fastest supercomputers

The U.S. Department of Energy said on Friday it is spending $425 million to research extreme-scale computing and build two super-computers, which would be the world's fastest, for research into basic science as well as nuclear weapons.

The DOE is awarding $325 million to build "Summit" for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and "Sierra" at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

An additional $100 million will go to research into "extreme scale supercomputing" technology as part of a program called FastForward2, the DOE said in a news release.

The supercomputers, made with components from IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox, will run five to seven times faster than the United States' current fastest computers .... http://www.reuters.com