In Brief For the first time since 1996, the United States is no longer home to one of the three fastest supercomputers in the world. To combat this, the DOE has announced plans to invest $258 million to help develop the next generation device. New Tech Race

The 20th century space race ushered in some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the era. Now, the efforts of private companies like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin, as well as traditional governmentalagencies like NASA, have sparked a new space racethats bringing about next-level space technologies.

However, the Space Race 2.0 isnt the only technological competition in the world today the smartest minds across the globeare competing to create the most powerful supercomputer on the planet.

Since 1996, the United States has consistently been home to one of the three fastest supercomputers in the world. Unfortunately for the U.S., that streak has ended as the Department of Energys (DOE) Titan supercomputer has been bumped to thenumber four slot. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centres Piz Daintnow holds the bronze following an upgrade involving the addition of Nvidia GPUs.

The U.S. is not taking this bump to fourth place lying down. Last week, the DOE announced that it was making $258 million availableto help fund the next big supercomputer.

According to MIT Technology Review, the U.S. government expects to have a system that can performone quintillion operations per second by 2021. That would be 50 times faster than Titan and 10 times faster thanChinas TaihuLight, the current world leader.

Of course, the rest of the world wont spend the next four years content with what theyve already created. China is looking to further cement its place at the top of the supercomputing heap by heavily investing in the next generation of supercomputers. The nation is even setting a more ambitious goal for itself than the U.S. they believe their more powerful machine will be ready by 2020.

Ultimately, this race for the worlds most powerful supercomputer will benefit us all, as the devices will help humanity with everything from healthcare to predicting the weather. Truly, there are no losers when innovation is the goal.

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The US Is Investing $258 Million to Build a More Powerful Supercomputer - Futurism