The 8 most powerful supercomputers in the world
The experience of using a computer today is nothing like it was a few decades ago. The sheer speed of computer systems has nearly doubled each year; transistors, once as big as a pencil eraser, have become so small that billions could fit on a fingernail. The average central processing unit (CPU) inside a current-day laptop can perform roughly 21 billion instructions per second—a number exponentially higher than even the most sophisticated computers in the 1970s.
But as computing power has grown, so too has the need to perform increasingly complex computations. We are collecting more and more data, all of which needs to be processed. New scientific fields, such as advanced weather forecasting, nuclear test simulations, cell modeling at the molecular level, and even simulating the human brain, have also become more complicated, warranting the need for even faster, more powerful supercomputers.
Where there is innovation, there is also competition. Organizations seek to create machines that can outdo one another in how many operations they can perform per second, a metric called floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). In the process, engineers swap out and engineer components of the computers so that they can race like Formula 1 cars. Some of these components (very much like a standard desktop computer) include:
These materials have become much more advanced in a very short period. Up until the early 2000s, China did not have a single supercomputer in the TOP500, the definitive ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In 2017, it holds almost a third of the TOP500 spots. The following list of the eight most powerful supercomputers in the world is based on the most up-to-date TOP500 ranking.
(Note: a computer’s real performance often falls short of its theoretical performance, which is calculated according to the Linpack benchmark for the TOP500. It’s more expensive to power a supercomputer than to deck it out with more processing components, so modern supercomputers are designed to contain more nodes than they could run. The theoretical peak performance is the upper limit of a computer’s performance. The Linpack benchmark approximates that, along with standardized, arithmetic speed tests.)
Fujitu’s K computer was the first supercomputer to have ever broken the ten petaFLOPS barrier in November 2011. The K in its name refers to the Japanese word “kei,” or 10 quadrillion—a reference to the number of FLOPS. To compute at this level, the K combines the power of 80,000 separate CPUs through specialized connectors designed to transmit data at high speeds. A water-cooling system makes individual CPU cores less likely to overheat.
Resulting from a collaboration between the University of Tokyo, the University of Tsukuba and Fujistu Limited, the supercomputer dubbed Oakforest-PACS broke the 25 petaFLOP barrier thanks to Intel’s latest generation of Xeon Phi processors, making it the fastest supercomputer in Japan.
