AMD lands $12.6m deal to develop next gen exascale supercomputers

The grant is part of the DOE's FastForward programme and provides AMD with $9.6m for processor related research and up to $3m for memory related research. The programme aims to create exascale machines roughly one thousand times faster than today's supercomputers by 2018. "This award from the DOE will fund critical research and development required to enable high performance, power efficient exascale systems," said Alan Lee, AMD's corporate vp for advanced research and development. "Additionally, AMD will undertake work to drive advances in memory bandwidth and communication speed, which are essential for heterogeneous architecture, exascale class supercomputers with thousands of processors." AMD's Opteron processors are used in many of the world's leading supercomputers, including IBM's Roadrunner computer at the DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory, which in 2008 was the first supercomputer to reach sustained petaflop performance.