The fastest supercomputers of the world can take science to the next level A new supercomputers’ breed can process five times faster than any of the previous models. These could prove to be a boon to future researches. While the computers and processing technology is becoming smaller, thinner and faster by the day; consider the power of computers which actually need a room to fit in. According to recent news, the United States’ Department of Energy is planning to develop two supercomputers that will be at least five to seven times faster than the previous versions. For this purpose, they plan to spend 425 million USD. The proposed computers will be able to lead future scientific researches to major advancements. 325 million USD of this budget is going to be allocated to manufacture two supercomputers, one of which will be named “Summit”. This one will be placed in the Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The second one called Sierra is being produced for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The remaining 100 million USD will be allocated to research and development in order to manufacture even faster versions. These two computers, Summit and Sierra will operate on a speed of 150 and 100 petaflops respectively. The unit is unique to supercomputer performance. This means that the Summit can perform as much as 150 million floating-point operations per second. The first ever supercomputer to reach the speed of one petaflop was invented very recently in 2008. Currently, the authorities are planning for Sierra to become the exclusive domain of The National Nuclear Security Administration. This will hence use its performance for ensuring the security, effectiveness and the safety of USA’s nuclear department without even testing it. According to Nvidia, who is one of the manufacturers of these computers; Summit will be made available to other nations as well that apply for this powerful technology. This will be a great boost to science and technology as the researchers will be able to use Summit to replicate and model everything, starting from weather behavior, to climate change and materials’ science and the performance of nuclear weapons. The greater the speed of the supercomputer, the better will be the detail of the models that can be created. The patterns of nature such as the earth’s climate and the effects of pollution, etc, are very difficult to recreate on the computer because of their complexity. This brings in the importance of having larger systems to increase the detail of the problems and their solutions.
Related Article: http://www.researchomatic.com/New-Research/Supercomputer-355698.html