The U.S. Department of Energy said today it will pump $258 million worth of funds into six technology firms to help them develop the first exascale supercomputer.

Exascale computers are systems that can achieve a “million, trillion calculations per second,” the DoE said. No such machine exists yet, but if it did, its computing power would dwarf that of the current most powerful supercomputer in the world, which is the 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight system at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China.

The DoE said it hopes to have at least one exascale supercomputer up and running by 2012, and working in production by 2022. It said by that time it expects a second exascale machine to have made the grade as well.

The Exascale Computing Project is part of the DoE’s PathForward program which aims to further the development of high-performance computing. The $258 million funding award is to be split among six American companies: Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Cray Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., IBM Corp., Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. The companies are required to foot some of the bill, about 40 percent of the total costs of the research, FCW reported.

The DoE already has a plan in place. The idea is that the tech companies will investigate specific areas of research, for example a system or application design, with input from some of the country’s best supercomputer software developers and engineers. Each company will have to present a final report on its studies, with a goal to figure out a way to build and supply affordable exascale supercomputers that meet the requirements of the DoE. These systems will ultimately end up in the hands of universities and government research labs, the DoE said.

“It isn’t that we send the money, wait three years, and get an answer,” Paul Messina, director of the energy department’s Exascale Computing Project, said in a statement. “The funding is based on specific work packages.”

The DoE said it plans to distribute the funds over a three-year period.

Image: Sandia Labs/Flickr