Since 2013, the U.S. and governments in Europe and Asia have been locked in a constant battle to equip supercomputers with more processing power to claim the ever-shifting title of world's fastest mega-machine. The U.S. relinquished its place at the top of the pile last June, but reclaimed it a year later when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed to get its Summit supercomputer online.

Now, patriotic computer geeks will be pleased that the two fastest supercomputers in the world currently reside within U.S. borders, according to the newest SuperComputer TOP500 List. Summit is now joined by Sierra, a machine housed at California's Lawrence Livermore National Library meant for nuclear arms research.

The TOP500 list uses a test called the LINPACK to assess how quickly a machine can do computations in units of work called "flops" for floating-point operations per second. Supercomputers, powerful as they are, usually rank in petaflops, or quadrillions of floating-point operations per second. This year, Summit improved its previous showing with a score of 143.5 petaflops per second. Sierra, on the other hand, ousted a Chinese machine for the number two spot by posting a score of 122.3 petaflops per second.

Just last year, it seemed something of a long shot for both Summit Sierra to scale the rankings and supersede China's Tianhe-2 and Sunway TaihuLight computers, which previously topped the list as the fastest and second fastest machines. Both Summit and Sierra are IBM products, powered by the company's Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs and equipped with 2.4 and 1.6 million processor cores, respectively.

Needless to say, the U.S. supercomputers are hulking machines made possible by a $250 million Department of Energy grant that sought to put the U.S. back on equal footing with its international counterparts. It looks as though it worked.

Source: The Verge



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