AMD has just been given a large amount of money from the US Department of Energy to invent extreme-scale computing.

The DOE award provides up to $9.6 million to AMD for processor-related research and up to $3 million for memory-related research. The cash is part of the FastForward project which is a collaboration between DOE office of science, and national nuclear security administration (NNSA).

The big idea is to accelerate the research and development of critical technologies needed for extreme scale computing, on the path toward exascale computing. Exascale supercomputers will be capable of performing one quintillion calculations per second which is a thousand times faster than today’s fastest supercomputers.

Alan Lee, AMD’s corporate vice president of research and advanced development said that under the deal AMD will drive advances in memory bandwidth and communication speed, which are essential for heterogeneous architecture.

This means that any ideas will probably use AMD Opteron processors, which are currently under the bonnet of IBM’s Roadrunner computer at the DOE’s Los Alamos national laboratory, and Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer deployed at Oak Ridge national laboratory.