The Department of Energy has started soliciting industry proposals for a contract to develop the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s next-generation high-performance computing system.
ORNL said Friday the future HPC system, Discovery, will replace the Frontier exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and is expected to be delivered by 2027 or early 2028.
The future supercomputer should be interoperable with other DOE facilities under the Integrated Research Infrastructure initiative, have advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and generate three to five times more computational throughput for scientific applications than Frontier.
“This project is exciting because we will be building something even more capable than Frontier, with technologies that will push the edge of what’s possible,” said Matt Sieger, the OLCF’s project director for Discovery.
Discovery is expected to support potential study areas, such as training AI algorithms for scientific discovery, speeding up drug discovery and treatments for cancer and predicting the impacts of climate change.
ORNL said the next-gen supercomputer and its capabilities are expected to meet the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program’s mission needs.
Proposals are due Aug. 30.