US beats China to build the world’s fastest supercomputer
The US just took back the title for the world's fastest supercomputer.
On Friday, the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee unveiled the 'Summit' supercomputer that can deliver a peak performance of 200 petaflops, or about 200 quadrillion calculations per second.
It managed to beat out the previous record holder that was China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer.
Summit is 60% faster than the TaihuLight supercomputer, which could achieve a peak performance of 93 petaflops.
The feat puts the US at the front of the top 500 supercomputers in the world -- the first time it has held such ranking since June 2013.
Summit has been in development for several years now and is made up of thousands of chips.
Specifically, it's powered by six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs and two 22-core IBM Power 9 chips.
It features 4,608 servers and an insane 10 petabytes of memory.
Summit is so big that the servers and other gear fill up to two tennis courts.
It's heavier than a commercial aircraft and a million times faster than your average laptop.
To keep cool, the network of servers requires about 4,000 gallons of water a minute so as to not overheat.
Summit is now the world's 'most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer,' according to IBM.
ORNL noted that its capable of over three billion-billion mixed precision calculations per second.
The Department of Energy noted that US supercomputing capabilities 'have grown exponentially by a factor of 300,000' since 1993.
'High-performance computing remains an integral priority for the DOE', the agency said in a statement.
Researchers and government officials will use Summit to carry out a variety of tasks tied to machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence.
For example, it can analyze massive amounts of data, such as medical reports and images, to identify previously unknown causes of disease, according to MIT Technology Review.
It will also help inform scientists about 'exascale' computers, which can handle up to a billion billion calculations a second, MIT noted.
In another experiment, researchers used Summit to analyze the difference between human genome sequences.
Now that Summit has been built, its creators hope that it can be used for a wide variety of scientific projects, including cancer research, modeling a fusion reactor and to identify patterns in the function and evolution of human proteins and cellular systems.
'Today’s launch of the Summit supercomputer demonstrates the strength of American leadership in scientific innovation and technology development,' said Secretary of Energy Rick Perry in a statement.
'It’s going to have a profound impact in energy research, scientific discovery, economic competitiveness, and national security'
'I am truly excited by the potential of Summit, as it moves the nation one step closer to the goal of delivering an exascale supercomputing system by 2021,' Perry added.
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