WASHINGTON – After losing out to most of Asia and Europe over having theworld’s fastest supercomputer for much of the last decade, the US is backon top with its Summit supercomputing machine. The machine resides in theUS Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In terms of hard numbers, the machine doesn’t disappoint with a theoreticalpeak of 200 petaflops (or 200,000 teraflops/trillion calculations persecond). In simpler words, it can process as many calculations as it wouldtake for 6.3 billion humans if they calculated every second for an entireyear in a second.

It dethrones China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which could do “only”93 petaflops. It is 8 times faster than America’s own previous best. Storedin Tennessee, it occupies as much space as two tennis courts. Power isprovided by 185 miles of cables, while 4000 gallons of water is suppliedevery hour to dissipate the heat.

The Summit was developed in co-operation with Nvidia and Intel, built outof 37000 processors, of which 28000 are graphical (which is quiteunorthodox for a supercomputer) and 9000 conventional, and 4608 individualcompute servers with each of them providing 10 petabytes of memory.

The supercomputer was built with the purpose of advancing the artificialintelligence research and development, but that won’t be its sole purpose.During its creation, researchers used it to discover the changes in thehuman genome, and expect it to predict climate variations, perform nuclearsimulations and natural resource mining.

China does still have the most of the world’s fastest supercomputers, 202,with US’s 143 and Japan’s 35 being the next best. With the rate at which weare seeing the increase in speeds, the goal of the first 1,000 petaflops,or an exascale supercomputer, could debut sooner than we’d expect.