Summit, the
US's new supercomputer, is more than twice as powerful as the current world
leader.
The machine
can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second - or 200 petaflops.
China's Sunway
TaihuLight supercomputer, until now the world's most powerful machine, has a
processing power of 93 petaflops.
Summit's
initial uses will include areas of astrophysics, cancer research and systems
biology.
It is housed
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, where it was developed in
partnership with IBM and NVidia.
Supercomputers
are typically large, expensive systems featuring tens of thousands of
processors designed to carry out specialised calculation-intensive tasks.
Summit
contains 4,608 compute servers and has more than 10 petabytes of memory.
ORNL
director Dr Thomas Zacharia said in a speech to mark its launch on 8 June that
Summit had already been used to run a comparative genomics code while it was
being built.
"Literally
as the machine was being assembled they were getting on the machine and
running," he said.
"Imagine
[driving a] race car while you're putting the tyres on."
'Back in the
game'
In the most
recent chart of the world's top supercomputers, published in 2017, the US owned
143 of the top 500 while China owned 202.
The US's
previous fastest supercomputer, Titan, was ranked fifth.
"We
know we're in a competition and it matters who gets there first," said US
Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, speaking at the ORNL event.
"The
ability to show the rest of the world that America is back in the game and
we're back in the game in a big way is really important.
"Summit's
computing capacity is so powerful that it has the ability to calculate 30
years' worth of data saved on a desktop in one hour... this is about changing
the world."
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