US President Barack Obama has put signatures on an executive order that calls for setting up the National Strategic Computing Initiative. This will help adopt a coordinated strategy involving multiple government agencies, academia and the private sector for the development of high performance computing systems.

The White House on Wednesday released a new executive order, demanding a new initiative to focus on supercomputing research. The president's order is titled as 'Creating a national strategic computing initiative'.

The initiative is aimed at creating a national strategic computing initiative to help the country establish a strong foothold in high-performance computing (HPC) research and development.

An exascale system will deliver high performance of 1 million trillion floating-point operations per second. However, an architecture capable of combining thousands of high-power processors and CPUs would be required for such a system.

Steve Scott, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Cray, said "To some degree it depends on how much money a country is willing to spend. You could build an exaflop computer tomorrow, but it'd be a crazy thing to do because of the cost and energy required to run it".

Obama's order has enabled the launch of the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). The US Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have partnered for the initiative. However, private sector will also be consulted.

Obama says that it is high time the US start developing a comprehensive technical and scientific approach to extend HPC research into hardware, system software, development tools, and applications.