US Supercomputer Becomes the World's First True Exascale Machine, the Fastest so Far

The United States has made history by creating the world's fastest supercomputer at the moment.

As of writing, the usual supercomputers that we know could only operate on a petascale. However, no company has not yet reached the exascale barrier over the past years.

Take a look at the Frontier supercomputer and how it shatters the barriers when it comes to processor speed.

Frontier Supercomputer Becomes World's Fastest

According to the latest report by Science Alert, the world's fastest supercomputer is now located in Tennessee, United States, particularly in the Oak Ridge Laboratory of the Department of Energy.

The special machine is capable of running up to 1.1 exaFlops or 1.1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

It's interesting to know that each year, a new supercomputer will surpass the current record made by the reigning machine.

Aside from becoming the fastest machine to date, the Frontier supercomputer has officially become the first true exascale machine, as TOP500 said in the new rankings chart.

Two years ago, Folding@home, a computing project which aids scientists in the field of therapeutics, reached the exascale marker.

While it managed to break the barrier, its calculations are spread in various computers, so it does not count as a true exascale machine. That's the difference that Frontier showcased to become the speediest supercomputer at the moment.

For the past years, many computer scientists have been exploring options on how to develop a super-advanced supercomputer that could process millions of data in just a short time.

As such, this amount of information is used to carry out operations in studying physics, creating models for weather and climate systems, and other applications.

The most complex problems can be accomplished using supercomputers and that's why experts use these machines for their research.

The improvement when it comes to data processing has been evident since the former fastest supercomputer in the world, Japan's Fugaku, has notched 415.5 quadrillion FLOPS.

Before it reached the top spot, there was the Summit supercomputer which IBM constructed. Fugaku's performance is said to be three times better than this machine.

"Considering the fact that Fugaku's theoretical peak is above the 1 exaFLOP barrier, there's cause to also call this system an exascale machine as well," TOP500 wrote in its announcement.

Chinese Supercomputer is Breaking Barriers As Well

Among the existing supercomputers out there, there's a darkhorse machine that China has created and presented during the International Supercomputing Conference high Performance 2022 in Germany.

According to CGTN, Jinan's National Supercomputing Center has developed a unique supercomputing platform called "Shanhe." During the battle between the storage systems, this machine dominated the rest of the entries on the IO-500 10 Node Challenge.

To date, the platform has succeeded in staying in the top rank after scoring 3,534.42. It's also the best result in the history of computing.

In April, Fujitsu announced that it will soon allow its customers to use a Fugaku-like supercomputer through a cloud platform, per Tech Times.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry