Mankind has not reached Mars, a cure for all diseases has not yet been invented, cars do not fly, but, nevertheless, there are areas in which people have reached unprecedented heights. The computing power of computers is one such.
To begin with, let's figure out what is the key parameter in assessing this characteristic of supercomputers. Flops is a value that shows the number of floating point operations that a computer can perform in a second. Based on this indicator, our ranking of the most powerful computers in the world was compiled, according to 2019 data.
The ranking was presented at the International Supercomputing Conference, the top 500 supercomputers were compiled by mathematicians from Lawrence National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.
10. Trinity - performance 8.1 Pflop / sec
This supercomputer is on guard for US military security, maintaining the effectiveness of the national nuclear arsenal. Given this, one might think that this device is incredibly expensive, however, starting in 2015, new, more powerful supercomputers began to replace it. Trinity is powered by the Cray XC40 system and has a performance of 8.1 Pflops / sec.
9. Mira - 8.6 Pflop / sec
Mira is another ingenious product from Cray. It is worth noting that the project of this supercomputer was developed by order of the United States Department of Energy. The main field of application of Mira is government industrial and research projects. The computing power of this computer is 8.6 petaflops per second.
8.K Computer - 10.5 Pflop / sec
The peculiarity of this supercomputer lies in its name, which comes from the Japanese word "kei" and means 10 quadrillion. The productive capacity of the K Computer is about 10.5 petaflops. The specificity of this technique is also that the system uses water cooling, which can significantly reduce energy consumption and reduce the speed of assembly.
7. Oakforest-Pacs - 13.6 Pflop / sec
The Japanese company Fujitsu, which also developed the K Computer, which was mentioned earlier, has created a new generation supercomputer (Knights Landing generation). The project was commissioned by the University of Tokyo and Tsukuba. Despite the fact that it was originally planned to equip the computer with 900 TB memory and a performance of 25 quadrillion operations, its computing power is 13.6 petaflops / s.
6. Cori - 14 Pflop / sec
Until 2017, Cori held a solid 5th position in the world ranking of the most powerful computers, but in the context of rapidly developing technical progress, it still yielded one rating "line" to the latest supercomputers. It is located at the Lawrence and Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. Cori has already made its unique contribution to the development of science: with its help, Swiss scientists were able to simulate a 45-qubit quantum computing system. 14 petaflops is the productive capacity of this "super machine".
5. Sequoia - 17.2 Petaflops
Many experts call Sequoia the fastest supercomputer in the world, and for good reason: its arithmetic performance is equal to the speed of 6.7 billion people who would perform an identical task using calculators for 320 years. Sequoia differs in its size: the computer covers an area of 390 square meters and consists of 96 racks. 17.2 petaflops - its performance, which equals almost sixteen thousand trillion operations.
4. Titan - 17.6 Pflop / sec
In addition to being among the top fastest computers in the world, the Titan is also considered one of the most energy efficient at 2142.77 megaflops per watt of energy consumed. The secret to saving energy lies in the use of Nvidia accelerators, which provide up to 90% of all computing power, which, by the way, is 17.6 petaflops. Thanks to them, Titan has noticeably reduced its dimensions - now it only needs 404 square meters to accommodate it.
3. Piz Daint - 19.6 Petaflops
The Piz Daint supercomputer project was launched back in 2013, in the Swiss city of Lugano. It is located in the same place - in the Swiss National Center for Supercomputers. Piz Daint has collected almost all the positive characteristics of the above analogs, including energy efficiency and high speed, except for compactness: the device consists of 28 large-sized racks. Its processing power is 19.6 petaflops.
2.Tianhe-2 - 33.9 Petaflops
The supercomputer with the romantic name "Milky Way" (translated from Chinese) until June 2016 topped the top 500 most powerful computers in the world. Its power provides a speed of 2507 trillion operations per second, which is equal to 33.9 petaflops. Tianhe-2 found its "vocation" in the field of construction: when calculating buildings and laying roads. It is worth noting that since the beginning of 2013, once the Milky Way was released, it did not leave the leading position in the ratings, which is a truly powerful indicator.
1. Sunway TaihuLight - 93 Petaflops
Inside this computer are 40,960 productive processors, which explains its size: Sunway itself occupies an area of about 1000 square meters. In 2016, at an international conference in Germany, it was recognized as the fastest of its kind. Today, Sunway TaihuLight is the first in the ranking and the only one in the top 10 supercomputers capable of generating 93 petaflops.
The most productive supercomputer in Russia
Sberbank together with SberCloud presented the most powerful supercomputer in Russia on November 8, 2019 - Christofari... It got its name in honor of the first client of the Savings Bank Nikolay Christofari.
The American company NVIDIA took part in the development of the computer. It is expected that its capabilities will be used to create services and processes related to artificial intelligence.
Supercomputer performance claimed at 6.7 petaflops... The estimated development cost was $ 12- $ 15 million.
If we consider technical progress in the context of its impact on humans, society as a whole and the environment, it is obvious that it has global shortcomings. Today we have access to a great variety of computers, various devices and robots. But the highest goal is to find a worthy application of the great inventions of mankind and direct their use for the benefit of our common future, without turning them into meaningless toys.