10 Most Powerful Super Computers in the World [Guide #2023]
Most of us consider a computer to be fast enough if it can play 8K videos or the latest edition of Far Cry at 60 frames per second without stuttering. Many complex activities, on the other hand, need billions of computations per second, which a desktop with an i9 CPU cannot do. In this article, we will explore the 10 most powerful computers in the world.
This is where supercomputers can help. They provide great performance, allowing governments and companies to address challenges that would be impossible to handle with traditional computers.
In today’s world, creators design supercomputers specifically for AI (artificial intelligence) workloads. Scientists use supercomputers to identify more durable construction materials and to investigate human proteins and biological systems in great detail.
Fugaku
Fugaku is the world’s fastest supercomputer, with a potential peak speed of 537 petaFLOPs. It’s also the first supercomputer to use ARM processors as its main CPU.
According to the HPCG benchmark, Fugaku’s performance outperforms the next four fastest supercomputers in the world combined.
It’s a huge accomplishment for Japan’s government, but creating such a sophisticated system wasn’t cheap. The government has invested around $1 billion on R&D, acquisitions, and application development for the initiative since 2014.
Fugaku operates on top of two operating systems: Linux and IHK/McKernel, a “light-weight multi-kernel OS.” McKernel performs high-performance simulations, whereas Linux handles Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant services.
It can deal with high-priority societal and scientific issues like weather forecasting. This also aids in medication discovery, customized treatment, and the study of quantum physics.
Summit
Summit has a peak performance of 200 petaFLOPS, or 200 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. With a power efficiency of 14.66 gigaFLOPS per watt, it is also the world’s third most energy-efficient supercomputer.
Summit’s 4,600+ servers comprise over 9,200 IBM Power9 CPUs and over 27,600 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The system uses enough energy to power 8,100 houses and has a connection of 185 kilometers of fiber optic cable.
Summit was the first supercomputer to reach the exascale level in 2018. It reached a peak throughput of 1.88 exaops, or approximately 2 billion computations per second while processing genetic data.
Sierra
Sierra outperforms Sequoia by up to 6 times in terms of sustained performance and 7 times in terms of workload performance. It combines IBM’s Power 9 CPUs with NVIDIA’s Volta GPUs on a single chip.
Designers created Sierra with the goal of evaluating the performance of nuclear weapons systems. Scientists implement Sierra for stockpile stewardship, the US program of nuclear weapon dependability testing, and nuclear weapon maintenance.
Sunway TaihuLight
TaihuLight’s computational power comes from a proprietary multiple-core SW26010 CPU, which incorporates both computing and management processing features.
The 260 processing components of a single SW26010 deliver a peak performance of more than 3 teraFLOPS (integrated into one CPU). A scratchpad memory acts as a user-controlled cache for each computer processing device. In most applications, this considerably reduces the memory constraint.
TaihuLight helps scientists to model the cosmos with 10 trillion digital particles, in addition to life sciences and pharmaceutical studies. China, on the other hand, is aiming for a lot more: the government has officially said that it wants to be the world leader in AI by 2030.
Tianhe-2A
Tianhe-2A is the world’s biggest installation of Intel Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi processors, with over 16,000 computer nodes. Despite the fact that each node has 88 gigabytes of memory, the overall memory (CPU+coprocessor) is 1,375 terabytes.
This supercomputer cost China 2.4 billion yuan (about $390 million). Simulations, analysis, and government security applications all benefit from it.
Frontera
Frontera provides significant computing resources, which offers up new possibilities in engineering and research. This makes it simpler for scientists to handle a variety of complicated problems in a variety of fields.
There are two computer subsystems in Frontera. The first is concerned with double-precision performance, whereas the second is concerned with single-precision stream-memory computation. For hosting virtual servers, it also includes cloud interfaces and many application nodes.
Piz Daint
To enhance effective bandwidth to and from storage devices, Piz Daint uses DataWarp’s ‘burst buffer mode.’ This speeds up data entry and output, making it easier to analyze millions of tiny, unstructured files.
It can conduct data analysis for some of the world’s most data-intensive projects in addition to its everyday chores.
Trinity
Trinity is designed to equip the NNSA Nuclear Security Enterprise with exceptional computing capabilities. Its goal is to increase the nuclear weapons simulation code’s geometry and physics accuracy. This supercomputer also contributes to the safe, secure, and effective management of the uclear stockpile.
The Intel Xeon Haswell CPU was used in the early stage of the supercomputer’s development. The Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Processor was used in the second stage, which resulted in a significant performance boost.
AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure
This is the world’s first large-scale Open AI Computing Infrastructure, with a peak performance of 32.577 petaFLOPS. There are 1,088 nodes in all, with 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, 2 InfiniBand EDR HCAs, and 1 NVMe SSD.
The supercomputer, according to Fujitsu Limited, can reach 20 times the thermal density of traditional data centers and has a cooling capacity of 70 kW Rack utilizing hot water and air cooling.
Lassen
For unclassified simulation and analysis, Lassen has been selected. It’s in the same lab as Sierra, and it’s built using the same materials.
Despite the fact that Sierra is a massive system, Lassen is a good size in its own right: it is exactly one-sixth the size of its bigger sibling. The Lassen system takes up 40 racks, whereas Sierra takes up 240.
Lassen achieves a maximum performance of 23 petaFLOPS thanks to IBM Power9 processors and 253 terabytes of main memory.
What kind of software works on supercomputers?
Because supercomputers are created for specific tasks, they require a unique operating system that is tailored to those tasks. It turns out that creating and maintaining closed-ended, proprietary operating systems is both costly and time-consuming.
Linux, on the other hand, is free, dependable, and easy to configure; and it is used by all current supercomputers. For each of the supercomputers, developers can tweak or create various versions of Linux.