The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded AMD a $32 million for exascale computing research as part of its FastForward 2 program.

AMD will be developing an exascale node architecture using its own Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA)-based APUs and a "new generation of memory interfaces," the company said.

The DOE's FastForward 2 initiative is intended to develop eventual commercial technology applications, the chipmaker noted, so the IP "created as part of this research will make its way into various future AMD products."

It is the third time that the DoE has given cash to AMD. The company's earlier research for the department includes work on interconnect architectures and massive processing node projects.

AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster said that if AMD pulls it off it could mean exascale supercomputers which are capable of performing more than one quintillion, or a billion billion calculations per second. This is 30 to 60 times faster than today's fastest available supercomputers.

"This research aims to deliver those huge increases in performance—without significant increases i energy consumption—to enable advances in diverse fields ranging from medical science to astrophysics and climate modeling. These could arrive as prototypes over the next several years, with full production units early in the next decade," he said.

Papermaster wrote in the company blog that he expected AMD's newly funded research into exascale computing to "aid any form of high-performance computing, including managing vast quantities of information for Big Data analytics and for rapidly processing the massive wave of anticipated Web requests."