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25/06/2018

Officially The World's Fastest Supercomputer Is IBM's Summit




Officially The World's Fastest Supercomputer Is IBM's Summit
IBM's supercomputer Summit is now officially the world's fastest supercomputer. This ranking was announced on Monday by a biannual ranking of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, or the Top500.
 
The Summit overtook China's Sunway TaihuLight to gain the top spot.
 
A statement for the ranking said that benchmark that is used to rank the Top500 list is performance on high-Performance linpack (HPL) and the Summit gained the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops. The supercomputer was recently unveiled at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
 
A petaflop is a defined as a unit of measurement of the processing speed of a computer.
 
The structure of Summit possibly reduced the traditional performance overhead of transferring data between the central processing unit and graphics processing unit, said Shan Hongzhang, a computer scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
 
Research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI) are the areas that the computer has been deigned to cater to.
 
After holding the top position as the fastest computer in the world for the last two years, the Sunway TaihuLight which was developed by China's National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology and was used at the National Supercomputing Center in Jiangsu Province.
 
Since the Chinese supercomputer had come online in June 2016, the HPL mark of 93 petaflops has remained unchanged.
 
With a performance deliverability of 71.6 petaflops on HPL, Sierra which is a new system developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California State, bags the third spot for the fastest computer in the world.
 
And at the number four spot - coming down from number two spot, was China's Tianhe-2A, which had been developed by the National University of Defense Technology and is currently installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. This super computer has undergone a major hardware upgrade which has helped to enhance its performance speed from 33.9 petaflops to 61.4 petaflops.
 
With 19.9 petaflops, the fifth-ranked computer system on the list is Japan's new AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure.
 
The most authoritative rankings of the world's supercomputers is the Top500 list. Experts from the United States and Germany conduct the speed and performance tests of the super computers on the basis of the Linpack benchmark.
 
(Source:www.xinhuanet.com)

Christopher J. Mitchell

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