World’s Fastest Supercomputer does 200 Quadrillion Calculations per Second

The USA has built the world’s fastest supercomputer which has the ability to perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second. Known as Summit, the fastest supercomputer in the world will provide scientists, researchers and other heavy users with enormous power to solve a wide range of global challenges. Ideally, the supercomputer offers a platform where users can run resource-intensive applications such as research on energy, health, artificial intelligence and other areas that require higher levels of computing power.

 

By building the Summit computer, USA reclaims the title of having the fastest supercomputer which China has held for the last five years.

Some interesting facts about the world’s fastest supercomputer

 

 

• The fastest computer in the world does 200 quadrillion calculations per second – which is beyond what the world’s population can do in one year.
• The supercomputer known as Summit weighs 340 tonnes and therefore heavier than a commercial aircraft.
• The computer is currently in the in Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee hill country. This is also the same place where first US atomic bombs were designed.
• The summit costs $200 million to build
• At 200 quadrillion or 200,000 trillion calculations in a second (200 petaflops), the world’s fastest computer almost works like a human brain.

• It would take a human being doing one calculation per second, (which is impossible), 6.3billion years to do what the fastest supercomputer does in the same one second.
• If every person on Earth works non stop doing one calculation per second, which is again impossible, the entire population will take 305 days to do what the world’s fastest computer does in one second.
• According to researchers testing the Summit, the fastest computer in the world was able to solve a problem that would take a normal desktop computer 30 years, in only one hour
• Other than being the fastest computer,  Summit is also the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
• It occupies about 5,600 square feet of floor space. This is almost the same area two tennis courts will cover.

• Uses up to 185 miles of fiber optic cable for connections
• The fastest supercomputer in the world uses 13 megawatts of electricity to function.
• The Summit uses 4000 gallons of water per minute in its cooling system.
• The most powerful computer in the world can store 250 petabytes of data. This is enough to hold high definition video that can run for 74 years non-stop.

 

 

 

Specifications for the world’s fastest computer

Below are the specs for the Summit supercomputer

 

Application Performance	200 PF
Number of Nodes	4,608
Node performance	42 TF
Memory per Node	512 GB DDR4 + 96 GB HBM2
NV memory per Node	1600 GB
Total System Memory	>10 PB DDR4 + HBM2 + Non-volatile
Processors	2 IBM POWER9™ 9,216 CPUs
	6 NVIDIA Volta™ 27,648 GPUs
File System	250 PB, 2.5 TB/s, GPFS™
Power Consumption	13 MW
Interconnect	Mellanox EDR 100G InfiniBand
Operating system	Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.4

 

 

 

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