US surpasses China to own the world's fastest supercomputer
The Summit supercomputer is capable of performing 200 trillion calculations per second and is twice the size of a tennis court.
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Summit surpasses Sunway TaihuLight to become the world's fastest computer. Photo:Engadget. |
American computer technology corporation IBM on June 8"unveiled" a supercomputer capable of performing 200 trillion calculations per second at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The supercomputer is called Summit.officialhelping the US regain the lead in the race to build the world's fastest computer,CNETreport
The previous record was held by China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which was capable of 93 trillion calculations per second, less than half the capacity of Summit. IBM’s new supercomputer is not only the fastest, but also the smartest computer in the world today. In comparison, a human with an average processing speed of one calculation per second would need 6.3 billion years to complete the calculations that Summit can perform in one second.
The Summit supercomputer is twice the size of a tennis court and weighs a total of 340 tons. It is equipped with 9,216 22-core IBM Power9 central processors, 27,648 NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processors and requires 15,000 liters of water per minute to cool.
According to the New York Times, the US government has invested about 200 million USD to build supercomputers like Summit to accelerate the development of technology in the field of computing. With the ability to process huge amounts of data in a short time, Summit will help the US solve challenges in science, technology and national security, while affirming its position as a technological power in the world.