Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research laboratory located near Lemont, IL. By size and scope, it is the largest national laboratory in the Midwest, and the initial inception of Argonne was to carry out Enrico Fermi's work on nuclear reactors as part of the Manhattan Project.
It was designated as the first national laboratory in the United States on July 1, 1946. These days the laboratory maintains a broad portfolio in basic science research, energy storage and renewable energy, environmental sustainability, supercomputing and national security.
On April 9, 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it will make $200 million available to Argonne National Laboratory with the understanding that it will make a high-performance supercomputer designed to be up to seven times faster than any of the current top supercomputers.
This is actually the third step in what should be the final part of a $525 million collaborative endeavor being referred to as CORAL. The government does love its acronyms; CORAL stands for Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore. Oak Ridge, located in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore, located in California previously received $325 million to build supercomputers in their laboratories.
This is the U.S.’s attempt to be in a competitive position on an international level with regards to next-generation computing efforts. The building of supercomputers will help the U.S. ensure its economic and national security. According to Lynn Orr, who is the undersecretary for science and energy, "The Aurora supercomputer will advance low-carbon energy technologies and our fundamental understanding of the universe."
An announcement was also made by Intel (News - Alert) today stating that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) has awarded Intel Federal LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation, a contract to deliver two next-generation supercomputers to Argonne National Laboratory.
Essentially, for the first time in the over twenty year history of supercomputing, a chipmaker has been awarded the contract to build a leading-edge national computing resource. This machine, which is expected to reach a peak performance of 180 petaflops, will provide incredible computing power to Argonne National Laboratory. A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
Argonne should receive the Aurora supercomputer from Intel sometime in 2018 and it will be available for scientific use by 2019.