From MB’s to GB’s, what is the maximum power of your computer or you heard of someone? We can bet it will be in Gigabytes only.
A computer of high-performance power is called Supercomputer. Performance of the supercomputers is measured in floating-point operations per seconds (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS)
Did you know if our Brain was a computer, it could perform 38 Trillion operations a second? That’s 500 times more than the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Here we are taking reference from ‘Top500’ to create this list of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world. It is one of the authorities who is giving rankings to these supercomputers since 1993.
Let’s start with the list and check out some of the fastest machines in the world.
10: LASSEN [USA]
This system is developed by IBM. This is the sister version of Sierra (machine located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) because of the similar architecture. Last fall, the machine had the top speed of 15.4 petaflops but it improved over the time and hits 18.2 petaflops.
Even though it is slower than its sibling, still an improvement to list it on the top 10 supercomputers of the world. This heavy machine gets IBM Power9/NVIDIA V100 GPU architecture to support the calculations.
9: SuperMUC-NG [Germany]
This supercomputer entered at number 8 position last year. Lenovo built it for the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany. Inside of the system contains the company’s Omni-Path interconnect and Intel Platinum Xeon processors.
It can provide HPL performance of 19.5 petaflops and operating solely by the x86 processors make this machine the most powerful supercomputer.
8: AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) [Japan]
This supercomputer is installed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. Earlier, AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) was positioned at number seven on the list.
Fujitsu built this energy-efficient machine using Primergy CX2550 servers geared with Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs and Xeon Gold processors. Boasting the energy efficiency of 12.05 gigaflops/watt, this machine can deliver the speed of 19.9 petaflops.
7: Trinity [USA]
To earn the number 7 position, this Cray XC40 system attains a speed of 20.2 petaflops which is a little more that our number 8 supercomputer. Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory operate this powerful machine.
It is located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. The system is powered by Intel Xeon Phi and Xeon processors which provide it the power efficiency of 3.678 gigaflops/watt.
6: Piz Daint [Switzerland]
Back in 2012, this supercomputer was numbered at 114. After rising steadily from that position, Piz Daint has fallen one spot from number five to number six. Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland, is the location of this machine.
This Cray XC50 system is equipped with NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs and Intel Xeon CPUs. With a performance of 21.2 petaflops, Piz Daint is the most powerful system in Europe.
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5: Frontera [USA]
This is a new entry on the list jumping straight into the competition this year at number 5. Frontera is installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas, Austin.
It is powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors. This Dell C6420 system has a peak performance of 23.5 petaflops on HPL.
4: Tianhe-2A (Milky Way 2A) [China]
Keeping its number 4 position intact, the Tianhe-2A system is deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. This system is developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.
Its maximum performance is 61.4 petaflops (the same as before) which comes from the Intel powered near 5 million core Xeon E5-2692v2 and Matrix-2000 processors. This system provides a power efficiency of 3.325 gigaflops per watt.
3. Sunway TaihuLight [China]
Serving at the 1st position for around 2 years, Sunway TaihuLight is consistently dropping its place. It was ranked number 2 in June last year and now at number 3. This system is installed at National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China.
It completely relies on 40,960 Sunway 26010 processors, each with 260 cores and doesn’t use any accelerator chips. With the power efficiency is 6.051 gigaflops/watt, this supercomputer has HPL performance of 93.0 petaflops.
2: Sierra [USA]
Sierra is consistent at number 2 position on the TOP500 list this year as well. IBM built this machine for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
IBM Power9 processors supply 1,572,480 cores to this supercomputer with another 1,382,400 cores boosted by Nvidia Volta GV100 accelerators. Just like its ranking, the performance remains unchanged at 94.6 petaflops (same as recorded six months ago)
1: Summit [USA]
This supercomputer is very impressive as this is the 3rd time it is making its appearance on the top of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world list. Each time it has improved its performance and ratings to beat the competitors. Last year the speed of this supercomputer was 143.5 petaflops which is enhanced this year to 148.6 petaflops.
This system is powered with 2,282,544 IBM Power9 cores and 2,090,880 Nvidia Volta GV100 cores. It was built for Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy. Maintaining the power efficiency of 11.324 gigaflops/watt, Summit has a theoretical peak performance of 187.66 petaflops.
There are some speedy computers all around us. We hope you find this post informative. Please don’t forget to share it with your loved ones.
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