Posted on 06/09/2018 10:09:48 AM PDT by BBell
America’s new supercomputer beats China’s fastest machine to take the 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. Continue Reading
Yeah, it’s fast, but can it post cute kitty pictures on Facebook?
Sorry, world’s fastest computer was the quickly dissapearing Wasserman Schultz DNC server...
Even Charles Forbin would not have asked that of his machine! It would have sploded!
I am surprise since China must have thousands of spies and “honey pots” in America.
Nope, the leading research and implementations are right here in the US of A. I _know_. ;-)
Does the number of back doors built into this machine scale with the increase in the number of calculations or with the number of processors?
Right at this moment, I have my desktop running a movie in Chrome Browser through Chromecast into my TV. Meanwhile, I’m viewing YouTube videos through Firefox, and also reading FR and typing a comment.
Not a hint of pauses or stoppages or hesitations, and everything is working perfectly, on my Windows 10 desktop.
I’m also researching/browsing for the next movie I’ll be watching in about 20 minutes, after the current one ends.
And, btw, I’ve had up to 60 web pages open at the same time, with no issues jumping from one page to the next, on various browsers (Opera, Chrome, Edge, SeaMonkey, Torch). Not a single issue anywhere (at least not yet, but, for now, all has been fine).
I remember when Cray was the standard for super computers. I imagine a typical desk top computer has as much power as the original Cray.
"Windows 11 will reduce it to 486 performance levels"
Your posts say it all...{:-)
Well good. But they have the hype
http://www.oakridger.com/news/20180608/ornl-now-home-to-americas-top-supercomputer-for-science
“Today’s launch of the Summit supercomputer demonstrates the strength of American leadership in scientific innovation and technology development. It’s going to have a profound impact in energy research, scientific discovery, economic competitiveness, and national security,” said Secretary Perry. “I am truly excited by the potential of Summit, as it moves the nation one step closer to the goal of delivering an exascale supercomputing system by 2021. Summit will empower scientists to address a wide range of new challenges, accelerate discovery, spur innovation, and above all, benefit the American people.”
Connecting ‘more’ computers together to work the Benchmarks isnt hard these days - only takes money these days - as its a scaling thing.
More important : is there a task for such machines to do that cant be handled piecemeal by lesser systems.
60% jump in capacity is nice, but the GPUs (those board you use in your PC to run recent games) with their massive SIMPLE processing abilities are limited only to certain problem sets.
Not until ISPs/Internet catch up....
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