Last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) issued a request for proposals (RFP) to develop a new supercomputer named Discovery. This supercomputer will replace the current known fastest supercomputer in the world, Frontier, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Discovery aims to surpass Frontier's performance, offering three to five times more computational throughput (e.g., 8.5 ExaFLOPS) by 2027 or early 2028.
ORNL mentions advanced AI, machine learning, improved energy efficiency, and comprehensive system modeling among the workloads that will run on the Discovery supercomputer. Unlike previous RFPs, this one does not specify an exact performance increase but only says that the new supercomputer has to be three to five times more powerful than its predecessor.
