Analysis.CastroMedia.org

Description

The United States federal government oversees extensive supercomputing resources across civilian and defense agencies.

Scope

  • Department of Energy systems include Frontier (~8.8×10^18 INT8 ops/s), Aurora (>1.6×10^19), and the forthcoming El Capitan (~1.6×10^19), alongside legacy machines like Summit (~1.6×10^18) and Sierra (~1×10^18).12345
  • Intelligence and defense bodies operate large data centers such as the NSA’s Utah facility (~8×10^18) and DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (~3.8×10^17).67
  • Civil agencies maintain additional capacity: NOAA’s weather forecasting machines (≈1.9×10^17) and NASA’s Aitken and Pleiades clusters (≈1.3×10^17), with other departments procuring cloud resources for analytics.89
  • Cloud contracts with providers like AWS and Microsoft make additional tens of exaflops accessible to federal agencies.1011

Summing these sources places federal compute near 1×10^20 dense INT8 operations per second. Further study is required to capture smaller agency clusters.

Implications

Control of massive compute gives the U.S. government significant leverage in scientific research, national security, and weather prediction, but centralization raises oversight questions and the risk of dual-use military applications.

Works cited

  1. U.S. Department of Energy, “Frontier Supercomputer Makes History,” 2022. https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/frontier-supercomputer-makes-history ↩

  2. Argonne National Laboratory, “Aurora Supercomputer to Exceed 2 Exaflops,” 2023. https://www.anl.gov/article/aurora-supercomputer-to-exceed-2-exaflops ↩

  3. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “LLNL’s El Capitan Supercomputer,” 2023. https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnls-el-capitan-supercomputer ↩

  4. Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, “Summit,” 2021. https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/ ↩

  5. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “Sequoia and Sierra Supercomputers,” 2018. https://www.llnl.gov/news/sequoia-and-sierra-supercomputers ↩

  6. Wired, “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center,” 2012. https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff-nsadatacenter/ ↩

  7. U.S. DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, “HPCMP at 47 Petaflops,” 2021. https://www.hpc.mil/ ↩

  8. NOAA, “NOAA upgrades weather forecasting supercomputers,” 2022. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-upgrades-weather-forecasting-supercomputers ↩

  9. NASA, “Aitken Supercomputer,” 2023. https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/aitken.html ↩

  10. FedScoop, “CIA expands AWS Secret Region,” 2024. https://fedscoop.com/cia-expands-aws-secret-region/ ↩

  11. FedScoop, “Pentagon awards Joint Warfighting Cloud contracts,” 2023. https://fedscoop.com/pentagon-joint-warfighting-cloud-contracts/ ↩