The position of the fastest supercomputer in the world, according to TOP500, belongs to Sunway TaihuLight, a Chinese supercomputer capable of 93 quadrillion calculations per second. Things may change soon though. With the Singapore Summit involving US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un coming to an end on Monday, US has another 'Summit' up its sleeve.
Just last week, IBM, NVIDIA and the US Department of Energy (DOE) revealed the World’s fastest supercomputer, Summit. For starters, the Summit has a peak performance of 200 petaflops or 200 quadrillion operations per second. It has an IBM AC922 system utilizing 4,608 compute servers containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators each. One particularly amazing specification of the Summit is the use of a 185 miles of fiber optics to keep it connected. 185 miles equals 297 kilometers, that’s more than the distance between Delhi and Jaipur!
The $200 million supercomputer is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and is available to researchers, university and laboratory staff, companies, and other government agencies, like NASA and NIH, to carry out research in their respective fields. The most useful application, however, may come from the field of medicine. Since the Summit’s machine learning capabilities are so vast, it can be trained to go through huge amounts of medical data to find never-before-detected causes or signs of diseases.
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