Supercomputers are the forefront of computer technology, reaching speeds that are, literally, thousands of times faster than the best desktop computer on the market. But what computer actually holds the current record for being the fastest computer in the world?
The record holder for some time has been the Jaguar supercomputer, which is maintained by the Department of Energy at its Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility in Tennessee. The Jaguar has demonstrated that it can process 1.79 petaflops per second, which is 1,790 trillion calculations per second, which is the single fastest speed ever recorded on a supercomputer – the fastest desktop computer would judge its speed in term of gigaflops, or millions of operations per second, to give a reference of how fast it’s operating. It’s theoretical limit is 2.33 petaflops, though the lab currently has an upgrade planned that will bring it even further than this. Recently a competitor came to light that could potentially give the Jaguar a run for its money.
China has come into the supercomputer scene in a big way with Nebulae, a supercomputer built in the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China. The Nebulae is an impressive machine, considering that China has not been a force in supercomputing beforehand. It has a theoretical speed of 2.98 petaflops/second, which is faster than the Jaguar’s theoretical speed, but it has only been clocked at 1.271 petaflops, which is still blindingly fast but considerably slower than the Jaguar. At this point in the game it’s hard to see what’s going to happen. Will the Nebulae end up beating the Jaguar? Or will the Jaguar’s upgrade end up putting it head and shoulder’s above the Negulae? As of right now these two are the big guns – no one else is expected to match them in the short term.
In the long term, however, the best computers may be already in production. IBM, working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is hoping to turn on the Sequoia, which they hope will shatter these other computers with a 20 petaflop speed. IBM is handcrafting a lot of the parts for Sequoia, as opposed to the Jaguar and Nebulae, which use standard processors clustered together to operate in sync with each other. IBM hopes that this plan will make the computers consume less energy, and offer better overall performance. The United States Department of Energy is helping fund this monster as well – hoping to use it to model the decay of our nuclear waste and weapons. It remains to be seen how successful it is.
The fastest computer in the world can easily change from year to year, or even month to month. This is an exciting time to be following the world of supercomputers!
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