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The US has the two fastest supercomputers in the world in use. The IBM Summit is hosted by the US Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) uses the smaller sister, Sierra, for a joint supercomputer project.

According to the November edition of the top 500 list, both supercomputers have dethroned Chinas counterpart Sunway TaihuLight in the field of computing power. Both the Summit and Sierra are IBM-built supercomputers, powered by Power9-CPUs and Nvidia V100-GPUs.

143.5 petaflops

Summit recently improved its performance score and is the world’s most powerful supercomputer with 143.5 petaflops. This supercomputer was specially built by IBM to work with AI solutions and is used by the ministry for research into high-energy physics, material discovery and healthcare. In some scientific applications, Summit would even be able to perform more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second. All this done from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The little sister Sierra, with a calculating power of 94.6 petaflops, is part of a joint supercomputer project of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of DOE and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL).

China and Switzerland

Over the past two years, China has claimed to have the world’s most powerful supercomputer in its possession with the Sunway TaihuLight, good for a 93 petaflops. Until the U.S. with IBMs Summit claimed this title last June, soon followed by sister Sierra . China now ranks third and fourth with the Tianhe-2A (54.9 petaflops), based at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho.

In addition to the US and China, Switzerland is also the owner of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, with the Piz Daint supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), which has a processing power of 25.3 petaflops.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.