Here's who will use the world's fastest supercomputer

The U.S. will soon venture into a new frontier with the creation of the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced on Tuesday that it has awarded a $600 million contract to Cray Inc. and AMD for the record-setting machine, aptly named Frontier. The supercomputer is scheduled to be completed and delivered to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021.

From 3D printing to star explosions, scientists and engineers are already excited about the impact the supercomputer will have on their field. Climate researchers, for example, will be able to use Frontier’s raw power to map climate change around the globe in a way that isn’t possible today.

“As the compute power increases, it provides new opportunities to obtain more and more details regarding the interactions that are driving organisms, ecosystems, and global climate patterns,” said Dan Jacobson, chief scientist for Computational Systems Biology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“With Frontier, we could potentially produce even higher resolution calculations to better understand the dynamics of complex systems,” he added. “Frontier will simply allow us to ask questions that are impossible now.”

Frontier will perform the “impossible” because it will be able to produce roughly the processing power of the world’s top 160 supercomputers combined, at more than 1.5 exaflops.

"If every person on the planet did one calculation a second, it would take them six years to do what Frontier will do in just one second," Cray CEO Peter Ungaro explained to CNBC.

“Frontier’s record-breaking performance will ensure our country’s ability to lead the world in science that improves the lives and economic prosperity of all Americans and the entire world,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. “Frontier will accelerate innovation in AI by giving American researchers world-class data and computing resources to ensure the next great inventions are made in the United States.”

Frontier will be a "huge machine," Ungaro said. When completed, the supercomputer will be about the size of two basketball courts and weigh over 1 million pounds, he added.