Supercomputers are used to model and simulate complex, dynamic systems that would be too expensive, impractical or impossible to physically demonstrate. Supercomputers are changing the way scientists explore the evolution of our universe, biological systems, weather forecasting and even renewable energy.
The Energy Department's National Labs have some of the most significant high performance computing resources available, including some of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The National Labs make their high performance computing facilities available to researchers from industry and academia so that these public investments in state-of-the-art technology are able to generate the greatest possible intellectual and economic benefit.
Exascale Supercomputers
Exascale supecomputers are the next generation of supercomputers, allowing scientists to better simulate the complex processes involved in stockpile stewardship, medicine, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, energy, material design and the physics of the universe, more quickly and with higher definition.
Exascale News and Views
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Summit Supercomputer
Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer. With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than America’s current top-ranked system.
Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence, among other domains. Summit will enable scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.