Supercomputers are extremely complex machines designed to perform trillions of calculations per second. They are used for scientific research, nuclear weapons simulations, and tasks requiring enormous processing power. Let’s take a look inside some of the fastest supercomputers on the planet.
IBM Summit Supercomputer
IBM Summit is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This machine consists of 4,608 servers, each with two 22-core Power9 CPUs and six Nvidia Volta GPUs, totaling over 27,000 GPUs.
Summit’s LINPACK performance is 148.6 petaflops, meaning it can perform 148.6 quadrillion calculations per second.
It is used for biological and nanoscale materials research, as well as climate modeling and severe weather forecasting. Summit’s servers and networking equipment fill two rooms the size of a basketball court and consume about 8 megawatts of power at full capacity. Cooling this amount of hardware requires 4,000 gallons of water per minute.
TaihuLight Supercomputer
TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. When it was first turned on in 2016, it became the fastest supercomputer in the world with a LINPACK performance of 93 petaflops.
TaihuLight has over 10,000 compute nodes, each with an Intel Xeon Phi co-processor and three Xeon CPUs. This supercomputer occupies an area of 4,000 square meters and consumes 15 to 18 megawatts of power at full speed.
The TaihuLight system is primarily used for numerical simulations, cloud computing, and deep learning research. Supercomputers like Summit and TaihuLight enable scientists and researchers to address complex problems on an unprecedented scale and contribute to the advancement of human knowledge. Sources and related content