In just a few decades, the strength of computers has 7starhd multiplied astonishingly: in 1985, the world's most powerful supercomputer, Cray-2, could process 1.9 billion floating point operations per second, or 1.9 gigaflops (the parameter used to measure the power of these machines). Today there are at least 500 supercomputers in the world that exceed the petaflop, or a thousand trillion flops.
Here are the ten most powerful computers in the world and some of their contributions to knowledge.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world today is Summit, built by IBM for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. It occupies the equivalent of two basketball courts and achieves an impressive 148.6 petaflops, thanks to its 2.41 million cores.
In addition to its large capacity, Summit is also the most energy-efficient machine in the global supercomputing top 10. Its mission is civilian scientific research, and since it became operational in 2018, it has already participated in projects such as searching for genetic variants in the population linked to diseases, simulating earthquakes in urban environments , the study of extreme weather events, the study of materials at the atomic scale or the explosion of supernovas, among others.
Until Summit and Sierra entered service in 2018, China ranked first in the world in supercomputing with TaihuLight, a machine built by the National Parallel Computing Engineering and Technology Research Center and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. Unlike other computers of its caliber, this supercomputer is deficient in terms of acceleration chips, so its 93 petaflops depend on 10 million Chinese Sunway processors.
China also maintains fourth place in the ranking with Tianhe-2A, or Milky Way 2A, developed by the National University of Defense Technology and equipped with Intel Xeon processors to achieve 61.4 petaflops. According to its operators, the machine is intended for calculations related to government security, among others.
China also maintains fourth place in the ranking with Tianhe-2A, or Milky Way 2A, developed by the National University of Defense Technology and equipped with Intel Xeon processors to achieve 61.4 petaflops. According to its operators, the machine is intended for calculations related to government security, among others.
