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Wired America hasn’t possessed the world’s most powerful supercomputer since June 2013, when a Chinese machine first claimed the title. Summit is expected to end that run when the official ranking of supercomputers, from an organization called Top500, is updated later this month.
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Summit, built by IBM, occupies floor space equivalent to two tennis courts, and slurps 4,000 gallons of water a minute around a circulatory system to cool its 37,000 processors. Oak Ridge says its new baby can deliver a peak performance of 200 quadrillion calculations per second (that’s 200 followed by 15 zeros) using a standard measure used to rate supercomputers, or 200 petaflops. That’s about a million times faster than a typical laptop, and nearly twice the peak performance of China’s top-ranking Sunway TaihuLight.
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The US, China, Japan, and European Union have all declared the first “exascale” computer—with more than 1,000 petaflops of computing power—as the next big milestone in large-scale computing. China claims it achieve that milestone by 2020, says Stephen Ezell, vice president for global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The US may get there in 2021 if Summit’s successor, known as Aurora, is completed on schedule, but the program has previously had delays.
The Trump administration’s budget this spring asked for $376 million extra funding to help meet the 2021 target. It’s now up to the nation’s legislators to approve it. “High performance computing is absolutely essential for a country’s national security, economic competitiveness, and ability to take on scientific challenges,” says Ezell.
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https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-again-has-worlds-most-powerful-supercomputer/
