AMD receives $12.6 million supercomputing grant from U.S. government

AMD has been granted a $12.6 million grant under the FastForward program, where they'll use the funds to research next-generation supercomputing technology. FastForward is part of a joint effort between the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Energy designed to advance research of exascale computers.

Exascale computers are going to open a can of whoop ass against the current supercomputers like Blue Waters, currently installed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that max out at around a thousand trillion operations per second, otherwise known as a petaflop. Exascale is set to process data up to a thousand times faster than current-generation petascale supercomputers. We're talking about some serious power here.

AMD will split the $12.6 million into $9.6 million to fund processor research and will use the remaining $3 million for memory advancements. This can only be good news, as AMD have been struggling for quite a while now. AMD have also previously worked with the U.S. government on supercomputer projects, with Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer being AMD-powered. Upgrades for that system known as Titan, are already under way. AMD have provided nearly 20,000 Opteron processors, worth close to $300,000.