U.S. Intelligence Community R&D Agency Has Awarded a Big Contract to Develop New Superconducting Computer

Reuters/Denis Balibouse

December 3, 2014

A member of the media films the room with the IBM Blue Gene Q Supercomputer on the launch day for the HBP at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Ecublens, near Lausanne October 7, 2013.

(Reuters) - The U.S. intelligence community has launched a multi-year research project to develop a superconducting computer, awarding its first contracts to three major technology companies.

International Business Machines Corp, Raytheon BBN Technologies and Northrop Grumman Corp won the contracts, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said Wednesday, without disclosing financial details.

The Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program could lead to a new generation of superconducting supercomputers, said the unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

"The energy demands of today’s high-performance computers have become a critical challenge for the Intelligence Community that the C3 program aims to address,” IARPA said in a statement. Such computers use massive amounts of energy.

According to ComputerWorld magazine, competition from Europe, Japan andChina, which has the world’s fastest computer, is spurring U.S. efforts to develop the next generation of superconducting supercomputers, called exascale.

In November, the Department of Energy awarded Advanced Micro Devices more than $32 million to fund exascale research. AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster, said in a blogpost that energy has been the biggest obstacle for exascale computing, or producing a billion billion calculations per second.

“Computers based on superconducting logic integrated with new kinds of cryogenic memory will allow expansion of current computing facilities while staying within space and energy budgets, and may enable supercomputer development beyond the exascale,” Marc Manheimer, C3 program manager at IARPA, said in the statement.