There's a new supercomputer that will soon by coming to Wyoming, in Cheyenne nonetheless, and it will rank among the fastest supercomputers throughout the world.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO announced on Wednesday (January 27th) that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has won a bid to financially back the new supercomputer center in Cheyenne. The bid was in the range between $35 million and $40 million.

The purpose of the new supercomputer coming to Wyoming is to help study several scientific based issues such as climate change, wildfires, severe weather, and solar flares.

Theoretically speaking, the new supercomputer, known as the HPE-Cray EX will have the ability to perform at almost 20 quadrillion calculations per second. That equates to 3.5 times faster than the current machine located at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer Center in Cheyenne. To give you an idea of just how fast the new supercomputer would be, imagine every person on the planet solving a math equation every second for an entire month. The speed of that is said to be the equivalent of the new supercomputer's maximum speed per second. That's pretty mind-blowing.

According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the new supercomputer will be installed in 2021 and will be ready for operational use in 2022, as it will rank among the world's top 25 fastest computers.

Director Everette Joseph said of the new supercomputer's capabilities that it:

will support basic research in ways that will lead to more detailed and useful predictions of the world around us, thereby helping to make our society more resilient to increasingly costly disasters and contributing to improved human health and well-being...

The name for the new supercomputer will be decided by a contest among Wyoming schoolchildren. The current supercomputer at the facility is named 'Cheyenne'.

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