A government laboratory in Illinois will receive the fastest supercomputer in the United States in 2021, and it will be the first to hit what’s called exascale-level processing. The mammoth machine, called Aurora, will live at Argonne National Laboratory, and will be able to accomplish tasks like simulating complex systems, running artificial intelligence, and conducting materials-science research.

Article Link – Popular Science – This Supercomputer Will Perform 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Operations Per Second

Discussion Questions:

1. What in the article did you find most interesting? Provide three key takeaways from the article.
2. Why do we need supercomputers? What are they used for?

Source: Rob Verger, Popular Science, “This Supercomputer Will Perform 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Operations Per Second”, www.popsci.com, March 21, 2019.