The budget proposal is for more than $126M split between the Office of Science ($91M) and the National Nuclear Security Administration ($36M). For the first time this is called "exascale"; in the past it was known as "extreme". Advanced computing gets $465M at DOE, of which this is part. The actual numbers are all speculation as the budget is the work of Congress and not the straw man proposed by the President.<p>Exascale computing presents major technical problems. See the short note by Peter Kogge in IEEE Spectrum,
<a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/nextgeneration-supercomputers/0" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/nextgeneration-s...</a>, and the 2008 DARPA report, <a href="http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/Research/CS/DARPA%20exascale%20-%20hardware%20(2008).pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/Research/CS/DARPA%20exascale%20-%...</a> .<p>The problems scaling traditional supercomputers into the exascale range are many and include, for example, the fact that that current computers require about 1.5 to 4 MW/PF.<p>The US used 61 billion kilowatt-hours of power for data centers and servers in 2006. That's 1.5 percent of all US electricity use, and it cost the companies that paid those bills more than $4.5 billion. This is expect to double by 2011. <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/nextgeneration-supercomputers/0" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/nextgeneration-s...</a> A BOE computation says that if we were to simply scale petaflop computers to a single exascale cluster the power consumption would be 4GW, or roughly 10% of all US electricity used in the US in 2006.<p>Clearly computation on this scale is not a priority or the real money is elsewhere.
<i>Exascale systems are 1,000 times more powerful than the Tianhe-1A, the Chinese supercomputer that was recently ranked as the world's fastest.</i><p>Alright, who here watched Watson on Jeopardy and now thinks what ever 1,000 times more powerful computer they build will have strong-AI?
I love how the only justification of why the government might need such a computer, or why this spending might be a good idea, is "it will be bigger than China's".