The U.S. Department of Energy have granted a two-year, $12.4 million contract for the research and development of exascale computer technology to NVIDIA. Scientists from DoE, and engineers from NVIDIA will work together in order to advance the field and produce an exascale computer that operates at a "reasonable" power level.

The focus of the joint effort will be on developing processor architecture, circuits, memory architecture, high-speed signalling, and programming models. The work done will involve thousands of throughput-optimized cores that will handle most of the heavy lifting, while some latency-optimized cores will do the residual serial computing. Seven DoE laboratories will guide NVIDIA as to what kind of scientific workloads the exascale computer will need to handle.

It was only last week that AMD were granted $12.6 million from the FastForward program for the same exascale research. The future is looking quite green indeed.