The United States of America has just launched the world’s fastest supercomputer. The computer was launched on June 8Th in Tennessee, at the Oak Ridge National Library where it is being housed. The supercomputer has surpassed China’s Sunway TaihuLight which has a processing power of 93 petaflops. The new supercomputer can process 200, 000 trillion calculations per second or 200 petaflops.
The Director of the Oak Ridge National Library, Dr. Thomas Zacharia praised the machine which has already been used to process genomics code while it was being assembled.He remarked “Imagine driving a race car while you’re putting on the tires!” This analogy serves to show the impressive speeds and functionality of the new supercomputer, which until now had never been achieved.
The Summit supercomputer was developed in partnership with technology conglomerates IBM and Nvidia. Supercomputers are often large and expensive systems that feature tens of thousands of processors. The Summit contains 4608 compute servers and more than petabytes of memory. They are designed to carry out specialized calculation-intensive tasks and will primarily be used for research study. The research will include areas of astrophysics, cancer and systems biology. The Secretary of Energy Rick Perry praised the new development.
“It’s about showing the world that America is back in the game. We know we are in a competition and it matters who gets there first”.
A recent chart published in 2017 showed that among the top 500 supercomputers in the world, US had 143 and China owned 202 of them. The previously fastest American supercomputer Titan ranked in fifth. The Summit has a capacity to calculate 30 years’ worth of data saved on a desktop in one hour.
Disclaimer:The image used is not the Summit Supercomputer