Supercomputing in 2021

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Appears in the February 2021 issue.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are waiting for the delivery of Aurora 21, one of the nation’s first exascale systems, capable of performing a billion billion—that’s a quintillion—calculations per second. One project planned with A21 is to map the connectome—the interconnected neuronal pathways of the brain—which was previously thought impossible. “Without the power of an Aurora, the tasks could not be accomplished,” says senior computer scientist Nicola Ferrier.

Illustration by Kevin Sterjo