President Obama has signed an executive order calling for the US to build the world’s fastest computer by 2025.
The supercomputer would be 20 times quicker than the current leading machine, which is in China.
It would be capable of making one quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second – a figure which is known as one exaflop.
A body called the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) will be set up to research and build the computer.
The US is seeking the new supercomputer, significantly faster than today’s models, to perform complex simulations and aid scientific research.
It is hoped the machine would help to analyse weather data for more accurate forecasts or assist in cancer diagnoses by analysing X-ray images.
A blog post on the White House website also suggests it could allow NASA scientists to model turbulence, which might enable the design of more streamlined aircraft without the need for extensive wind tunnel testing.
Such a computer would be called an exascale machine.
Richard Kenway at the University of Edinburgh says he thinks the plan is “spot on” in terms of strategy, bringing together both the ambition to develop new hardware and also improved analysis of big data.
He explained the computer could aid the development of personalised medicines, tailored to specific individuals.
“Today, drugs are designed for the average human and they work OK for some people but not others,” he told the BBC.
“The real challenge in precision medicine is to move from designing average drugs to designing drugs for the individual because you can know their genome and their lifestyle.”
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