US launches world’s most powerful supercomputer

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. – Oak Ridge National Laboratory and IBM have successfully built and launched the Summit supercomputer, the world’s most powerful and smartest supercomputer.

The heavy-duty computer is the next step toward a national goal of developing the world’s first fully capable exascale machine by 2021.

An exascale computer is one that is capable of making 1 billion billion calculations per second.

The Summit supercomputer has a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second – or 200 petaflops, making it eight times faster than the Titan Cray X supercomputer that came before it.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Thomas Zacharia said Summit has already proved itself capable of making exascale calculations in some scientific areas.

During its installation, scientists used it to make more than 1.8 quintillion calculations in a single second in bioenergy and human health research.

“This is the first time anyone has broken the exascale barrier,” Zacharia said. “Today’s Summit also gives us confidence we can deliver on a fully capable exascale computing resource by the year 2021.”

Summit’s unprecedented computing power will aid scientists in researching energy, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, astrophysics and medicine in ways that were not previously possible.