U.S. Lays Claim To The World’s Fastest Supercomputers

Rankings for the world’s fastest supercomputers are released biannually. Summit and Sierra are the world’s top two fastest supercomputers and both of them are in the United States. They rely on IBM technology. On the list of the top ten supercomputers worldwide, five of them are American.

Summit was named as the world’s fastest computer in June this year. It set a new record on the mathematical test LINPACK at 122.3 petaflops per second. For those who are unaware, a petaflop is equal to one quintillion math operations. The computer has received more upgrades since then and it can now do that same test at 143.5 petaflops per second. This provides Summit with a massive advantage over the other 499 supercomputers on this list.

Summit has 2.4 million processor cores while Sierra has 1.6 million. Both have similar specs as they run on IBM Power9 processors with NVIDIA Tesla V100 accelerator chips. Even though Sierra has fewer processor cores, it made use of a recent upgrade to up its computing power from 71.6 petaflops to 94.6 petaflops and thus dislodged Chinese supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight from the second position.

Two of the world’s fastest supercomputers are now American. The top ten list includes five from the United States, two from China, and one each from Switzerland, Germany, and Japan.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Computers
Tags: supercomputers