The US has retaken its place as the country with the most powerful supercomputer after the Department of Energy, on Friday, unveiled the new IBM-made Summit. Summit, which replaces previous-record holder, China's Sunway TaihuLight, can run 200 quadrillion calculations per second, is almost the size of two tennis courts, and consumes water and electricity like a small town. Here's more on this beast.

Specs The computer with the appetite of a town

Summit has 4,608 servers or interconnected computer nodes, which take up the size of two tennis courts, and has a cooling system which consumes 4,000 gallons of water a minute. Each node has two 22-core IBM Power9 chips running at 3.1GHz, coupled with six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics chips. Summit consumes 15 megawatts of power at peak capacity - enough to power 8,100 homes.

Information What Summit can do, simply said

If the numbers baffle you, here's some perspective. Summit has 100 times the memory of a high-end laptop, and around 1,000 times the storage capacity. Summit can, in an hour, complete a task which would take 30 years for a desktop computer.

First step Summit: The first step to a supercomputer ecosystem for research Credits:

Summit, with its 1.88 exaop record, was built for artificial intelligence operations using machine learning and deep learning to power research across various fields from Physics to health-care. For those unaware, an exascale calculation or one exaop is one billion billion calculations per second. It's the first step towards the US' vision of a fully capable exascale computing ecosystem for research by 2021.

Quote Summit has opened up a new frontier in science

"Summit is enabling a whole new range of science that was simply not possible before it arrived," said Dan Jacobson, a computational biologist from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the lab where Summit is housed.

Research Upcoming research projects where Summit will be used