Ernest Moniz, US Secretary of Energy, announced two new High Performance Computing (HPC) awards. The first award, at $325 million, is for two new supercomputers at the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as part of the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) program.

CORAL was created earlier this year to streamline the procurement process and reduce supercomputer costs. The Department of Energy considers the computers essential to national security, as well as the scientific and technical advantages which help drive US economic growth. The new computers are being developed by AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel and NVIDIA among other companies and organizations.

An additional $100 million investment in the FastForward2 program was also announced. FastFoward2 is a research and development program aimed at developing next generation computing for 2020 and beyond.

“High-performance computing is an essential component of the science and technology portfolio required to maintain U.S. competitiveness and ensure our economic and national security. DOE and its National Labs have always been at the forefront of HPC and we expect that critical supercomputing investments like CORAL and FastForward 2 will again lead to transformational advancements in basic science, national defense, environmental and energy research that rely on simulations of complex physical systems and analysis of massive amounts of data,” said Moniz in a statement.

Although not stated directly in the Department of Energy statement it is hoped that the new computing systems will bypass China’s Tianhe-2 as the world’s fastest. Tianhe-2 clocks in at speeds up to 33.86 petaflops or 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations per second. That speed is more than twice that of the next most powerful computer, the Cray currently housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The overall aim of these investments and the CORAL and FastForward2 programs is to develop systems 20-40 times faster than current supercomputers.