Obama Wants Supercomputer That Can Mimic Brain

Supercomputers like this one in France have many complex uses. Pic SkyNews.

US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order to create the world’s first exaflop supercomputer.

The machine would be more than 30 times faster than today’s fastest supercomputer, reaching exascale speeds of a billion billion calculations per second.

The US energy, defence and science departments will team up on the project, to create super powerful computers for use by NASA, the FBI and the Department for Homeland Security.

An exascale computer would be so advanced that it would be capable of mimicking the human brain.

The US currently has the second fastest supercomputer, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory which runs at 17.6 petaflops.

China’s Tianhe-2 is the world leader, running at 33.86 petaflops.

Earlier this year Intel won a $200m contract from the US government to build a 180-petaflops computer by 2018.

An exoflop is around 1,000 petaflops.

Supercomputers are useful for everything from modelling drug effects to predicting the consequences of climate change.

The US currently has more supercomputers in the top 500 list, but lawmakers are concerned that the country could fall behind China.-SkyNews