US vs. China – America reclaims “world’s fastest” supercomputer title
The U.S. debuted its new IBM supercomputer Friday, which it says is the fastest in the world – taking the title away from China.
The supercomputer, named Summit, is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and can perform 200,000 trillion calculations per second, according to IBM. That’s eight times more powerful than Cray’s Titan supercomputer and nearly twice as fast as the peak speed for Chinese supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight.
Summit’s uses will include applying machine learning to genetic data to find patterns for treatments for Alzheimer’s, heart disease and opioid addiction and to study supernovas. Summit incorporates technology from Nvidia and cost about $200 million.
The last time a U.S. computer was the world’s fastest was in November 2012.
The next global ranking of the fastest scientific computers will be released June 25.