World’s fastest supercomputer can process data at 200 quadrillion per second

How fast do you think the fastest computer is? Well, it can do mathematical calculations at the rate of 200 quadrillion per second. [caption id=“attachment_4503775” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image.[/caption] US has won bragging rights for building the world’s fastest supercomputer. For the last five years, China has been accredited for building the seediest computer of the world. However, the US has now taken back it lead with its new machine called Summit, which is built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The supercomputer cost around $200 million to build. The NYT puts it well is perspective by explaining the Summit’s speed with this analogy: “If a stadium built for 100,000 people was full, and everyone in it had a modern laptop, it would take 20 stadiums to match the computing firepower of Summit.” Summit is made up of rows of black, refrigerator-size units that carry a total weight of 340 tons and are housed in a 9,250 square-foot room. The supercomputer is powered by 9,216 central processing chips from IBM and 27,648 graphics processors from Nvidia, another American tech company, that are lashed together with 185 miles of fiber-optic cable. Although if seen the number of supercomputers overall, then that still belong to China. And if reports are to be believed, China, Japan and Europe are working on machines that will run even faster than the Summit. Along with superfast calculation, the Summit is also proficient in operations involving artificial intelligence. The global supercomputer rankings have been compiled for more than two decades by a small team of computer scientists who put together a Top 500 list. It is led by Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee. The newest list will not be released until later this month, but Dongarra said he was certain that Summit was the fastest.