US unveils world's most powerful supercomputer...designed from the ground up to handle machine learning,
America’s new supercomputer beats China’s fastest machine
to take title of world’s most powerful
Summit is a stepping stone toward a world of exascale
computing.
The winner: The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee has taken the wraps off Summit, which boasts
peak computing power of 200 petaflops, or 200 million billion calculations a
second. That makes it a million times faster than your typical laptop.
The loser: China. Summit is 60 percent faster than the
previous supercomputing leader, the Sunway TaihuLight based in the Chinese city
of Wuxi. Consolation prize: China still boasted way more entries than the US in
a list of the fastest 500 supercomputers published last year.
AI smarts: Summit is the first supercomputer designed
from the ground up to handle machine learning, neural networks, and other AI
applications. Its many thousands of AI-optimized chips from Nvidia and IBM can
handle demanding tasks, such as crunching through mountains of reports and
medical images to help unearth hidden causes of disease.
Supersized: The machine’s 4,608 servers and associated
gear fill the space of two tennis courts and weigh more than a large commercial
aircraft.
Why this matters: Topping the supercomputing charts isn’t
just a matter of national pride. The machines are widely used in industry and
also for national security tasks, such as developing nuclear weapons. Lessons
from Summit will also inform the push to create “exascale” computers capable of
handling a billion billion calculations a second. These are expected to come
online in the early 2020s.
Comments
Post a Comment