After having his meeting with tech leaders in Silicon Valley, President Obama has now approved funding of $126 million for the next generation of supercomputers, an exascale system. This funding has been included in his 2012 budget proposal and will go to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), developer of world’s fastest computers. Now the funding is up to approval of Congress and if it gets approved, DOE will get $126 million for exascale development out of which $91 million will be for the DOE’s Office of Science and $36 million for National Nuclear Security Administration.

This exascale funding is a part of the DOE advanced computing request for 2012, making it $465 million, around 21% more than the year 2010 budget. The reason for the funding is that White House is seeing huge prospects in high-performance computing as it crosses a barrier every 10 to 11 years due to chip performance improvements.

Just to let you know, exascales are 1,000 times more powerful than Tianhe-1A, a recently first-ranked Chinese supercomputer. Its development is expected to take place somewhere in 2018-2020. Once developed, it would be used for modeling & simulation with higher resolutions, such as for forecasting & understanding the climate change.

Back to the President’s meeting with tech leaders, a White House official reported:

“The meeting is a part of our ongoing dialogue with the business community on how we can work together to win the future, strengthen our economy, support entrepreneurship, increasing our exports, and get the American people back to work. The President and the business leaders will discuss our shared goal of promoting American innovation, and discuss his commitment to new investments in research and development, education and clean energy.”

The meeting saw the presence of industry’s leading names including Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Eric Schimdt, John Chambers and Carol Baltz among others.

As President Obama is in a techie mood these days, he’s also visiting Intel’s advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility in Oregon and will name Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini to his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness as an effort to restart relationships with business community.