IBM Unveils World’s Fastest Supercomputer

It’s pretty much the Usain Bolt of computers. Last week, the U.S. took back the title of world’s fastest computer when IBM and U.S. Department of Energy unveiled Summit, a supercomputer that is claimed to be twice as fast as the current world record holder. Even though China still has more supercomputers on the top 500 list, this bad boy takes the cake when it comes to speed. Apparently, Summit’s processing power has been clocked at a mere 200 petaflops, or 200 quadrillion calculations per second. That’s as fast as every person on the planet doing 16 million calculations per second.

Designed for AI and machine learning and costing over $200 million to build, Summit is made up of 4,608 nodes, each running two IBM Power9 CPUs with 22 processing cores. That’s basically rocket fuel for computing power. Where was this computer during college Calc 2, when I really needed it?