The Top 10 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world 2017 is out.
The report was released at the 2017 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
Here’s a list of the Top 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Sunway TaihuLight — China
Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) — China
Piz Daint — Switzerland
Titan — United States
Sequoia — United States
Cori — United States
Oakforest-PACS — Japan
K Computer — Japan
Mira — United States
Trinity — United States
China holds the top two spots for fastest computers in the world, and Switzerland holds the third, with the U.S. in the fourth, fifth and sixth spots.
The new ranking shows that for the second year running, the world’s fastest supercomputer is TaihuLight, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China.
It’s Capable of performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, it’s almost three times faster than the second-place Tianhe-2.
In third spot this year is a newly upgraded device, called Piz Dain, at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, which recently had its performance boosted by the addition of Nvidia GPUs.
What is a super computer??
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of computing performance compared to a general-purpose computer.
Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
what are they used for??
Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields including
- quantum mechanics,
- weather forecasting,
- climate research,
- oil and gas exploration,
- molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals)
- physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion).
Throughout their history, they have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.
These computers process at petascale speeds, meaning their capabilities are measured in terms of one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.
To put that in perspective, consumer laptops now operate at gigascale, which is one billion calculations per second.
An exascale computer is capable of processing a quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.
That’s about a trillion times more powerful than a consumer laptop.
The more powerful the computer, the more realistic the models are, which in turn provide scientists with more reliable predictions about the future and more concrete recommendations about what companies and governments need to do.
The U.S. government reckons it will have a system capable of performing one quintillion operations per second—that’s 1,000 quadrillion, and 10 times the capacity of TaihuLight—by 2021.
Japan also is building the world’s fastest supercomputer, which it hopes will make the country the new global hub for artificial intelligence research.
The supercomputer is expected to run at a speed of 130 petaflops, meaning it is able to perform a mind-boggling 130 quadrillion calculations per second (that’s 130 million billion).
Once complete (the target date is April 2018), the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) will be the most powerful supercomputer in the world, surpassing the current champion, China’s Sunway TaihuLight, currently operating at 93 petaflops.
Well Speed really matters after all…