US Department of Energy has chosen AMD, the other large Silicon Valley processor maker, to participate in two research projects for the department’s extreme-scale computing research program called FastForward.

The two projects’ total worth to Sunnyvale, California-based AMD is US$12.6m, $9.6m of which is for processor research. The rest is for memory-related research the government has asked AMD to do.

Thuc Hoang, of the DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, said the contracts were a way for the department to be proactive about preparing for the next phase of extreme-scale computing.

“A key to successfully developing next-generation HPC capabilities is bringing together the know-how and best minds of industry leaders and national labs to work on this grand challenge,” Hoang said.

The DoE is collaborating on FastForward with the National Nuclear Security Administration, funding the program jointly. The agencies are engaging with multiple private-sector companies on this R&D project.

Exascale computers will be able to perform one quintillion calculations per second. A quintillion is one billion billion.

The speed is about one thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputers available today, according to AMD.

The DoE is interested in exascale computing because it wants to make sure this technology is available for national security and scientific discovery, William Harrod, division director of research at the DoE’s Office of Science, explained.

AMD Opteron processors are already in use by some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, including IBM’s Roadrunner system at the DoE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2008, Roadrunner became the first supercomputer to reach sustained petaflop performance, according to AMD.