Important Innovations Collection

US Department of Energy's Aurora Source:  Argonne National Lab  One Billion-Billion Operations Per Second At the US Department of Energy's  Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago,  the US' first exascale supercomputer will be built at a cost of $500 million.  It will perform one quintillion, or ten with 18 zeros, operations per second.  That's 50 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. Argonne is operated by the University of Chicago.  Aurora is scheduled to start operating in 2021. Tremendous Possibilities The potential uses of this new supercomputer are tremendous.  It's being built for next generation artificial intelligence and combines that with unprecedented processing power.  Argonne Director Paul Kearns says it will accelerate breakthrough medical treatments, human brain mapping, improve extreme weather forecasting and much more.  It's also a powerful tool for simulations (in the picture above) that mo...

New Supercomputer Source:  DARPA  1 Million Processors A computer that is just like a human brain has just been developed.  It has 1 million processing cores and 1200 interconnected circuits.  The combination is a supercomputer that scientists say can simulate brain activity with more accuracy than any other computer in the world. 10 Years Under Development It's the world's largest neuromorphic computer, a type of computer that mimics the firing of brain neurons.  It's been developed over the past 10 years at the University of Manchester in the UK.  According to the scientists, it rethinks the way conventional computers work.  They call it SpiNNaker. Just Like a Brain The computer doesn't just think like a brain.  It creates models of neurons in human brains and simulates more neurons in real time.  Its primary purpose is to produce partial brain models such as of the cortex.  It may play a significant role in solving and c...