The United States of America is on top again as the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee have launched a Summit supercomputer, world’s most powerful and smartest machine. It has enough processing power which is capable of making 200,000 trillion calculations per second. The powerful computer is the next step to achieve a national goal of developing the world’s first fully capable exascale computing by 2021. An exascale computer is one that is capable of making one billion billion calculations per second.

It’s blink of an eye delivery makes it eight times faster than the China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which was ranked number one in top 500 list in the fastest supercomputer in the world. Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thomas Zacharia said that Summit has already proved itself capable of making exascale calculations in some scientific areas. During its installation, the scientists used it to make above 1.8 quintillion calculations in a single second in bioenergy and human health research. Zacharia was quoted saying, “This is the first time anyone has broken the exascale barrier.” The director further added, “Today's Summit also gives us confidence we can deliver on a fully capable exascale computing resource by the year 2021.”

Watch video from Summit supercomputer installation!

The scientists have already started training Summit to read documents and abstract information in order to identify unseen disease factors such as genes, biological markets and environment for cancer surveillance. Rick Perry, Department of Energy Secretary was quoted saying, “There are things this computer does that I can't explain, but what I can explain is that there are people's lives out there that can be changed, maybe a loved one with a terrible disease.” He added, “It's what we do right here in Oak Ridge, we find a cure. ... It's about making people's lives better.” Summit’s extraordinary computing power will provide scientists in researching energy, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, astrophysics and medicine in ways that were never possible earlier.

Summit replaced Oak Ridge’s earlier supercomputer Titan Cray X which was debuted as world’s leading computer in 2012 which had 76 quadrillion calculations per second. But soon it was dropped to fourth place on the world last year when China with Sunway TaihuLight ranked number one. Now with such computing skills, Oak Ridge comes in the lead again with Summit supercomputer.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 09, 2018 11:22 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).