It will provide more than 50 times the performance of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan.

NVIDIA announced that it has been selected as one of the recipients of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which was established to promote the development of next-generation supercomputers.

Through this project, a total of six companies, including NVIDIA, were awarded a total of $258 million (approximately 290 billion KRW) in high-performance computing (HPC) research funding.

ECP aims to implement at least two exascale computing systems and plans to implement at least one by 2021. Such a system is expected to provide performance approximately 50 times more powerful than the current Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States.

The ECP PathForward program aims to develop solutions that maximize the energy efficiency and overall performance of future large-scale supercomputers that will play a role in fields such as national security, manufacturing, industrial competitiveness, and energy research.

NVIDIA plans to focus R&D on key areas such as energy-efficient GPU architecture and resilience, and the research results will be incorporated into the next-generation architecture following Volta. Meanwhile, Volta is scheduled to be used for the Department of Energy's flagship supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, which will begin operation in 2018.

The U.S. Department of Energy has made supercomputer research a top priority. The Department’s PassForward technology requirements state: “The United States faces urgent and severe challenges to the economy, environment, and national security due to increasing energy, climate, and security threats. High-performance computing is essential for addressing these challenges, and the development of exascale computers with sufficient performance to solve these problems is required.”