What Is A Supercomputer?

China held the lead for the last 5 years, but the United States now has the world's fastest supercomputer. The machine, called Summit, was built for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in partnership with IBM and NVidia, and is designed for AI applications.

Today's supercomputers are made up of thousands of connected processors, and their speed has grown exponentially over the past few decades. The first supercomputer, released in 1964, was called the CDC 6600. It used a single processor to achieve 3 million calculations per second. While that may sound impressive, it is tens of thousands of times slower than an iPhone.

The Lab Director of Oak Ridge, Thomas Zacharia, says, "I've always thought of supercomputing as a time machine, in the sense that it allows you to do things that most other people will be able to do in the future." As he explains, smartphones today are more powerful than the supercomputers used in the 1990s to work on the Human Genome Project.

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What Is A Supercomputer? | CNBC

[danyala.]

One day we will look back to this moment and laugh at how slow this computer was.

[MotivationHandbook]

50 yrs from now that specs will be in a phone that will fit in our pockets 😊

[anuraag]

" Yes mom I need this for ZOOM classes"

[comment.highlighted]

Somewhere there’s an Asian kid out calculating the super computer with his abacus 👽

[surge]

What did they use to cool this thing. THE PACIFIC OCEAN!!

[musabbafridi]

“This is not the space race, this is the race to knowledge”-Nvidia guy

What does this guy think the space race was about?

[waseemtahir]

I'm sure in less than 40 years from now some handheld device will have greater processing speed than this.

[Monoplayz]

Friend: Hey! How much FPS do you get
Me: Nearly 5 million, still slow, tho

[extrinity]

But can it run...





MINECRAFT?!?!?

[HN-vupp]

When quantum computers are on the market this’ll be history

[Yowill]

5000 gallons per minute of water??? Are u kidding me...

[ye]

a super computer is computer with super powers

[WearySteerer]

And when the cooling system springs a leak? 🤕

[bluecyrusgaming]

20-30 years from now, people will say " The chip inside your brain is faster than the supercomputers in the 20's " XD

[abbyysnet]

But will it work on crysis and minecraft?

[shubhoooo]

imagine gaming at this thing at over 1000 fps. But no monitor is capable of this refresh rate

[okamijubei]

200 quintillion calculations per second sounds impressive now but likely in a decade or two, microcomputers and minicomputers will perform at that rate at a palm of our hand.

[vickyvenice]

What if we play games like fortnite with that supercomputer?

Probably billions of fps

[thewhizkid]

A computer capable of computing many different calculations simultaneously.

[akkihole_]

Just imagine using a physics simulation with this thing and 200 Quadrillion calculations per second.