At the end of July, workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee began filling up a cavernous room with the makings of a computational behemoth: row upon row of neatly stacked computing units, some 290 kilometres of fibre-optic cable and a cooling system capable of carrying a swimming pool’s worth of water. The US Department of Energy (DOE) expects that when this US$280-million machine, called Summit, becomes ready next year, it will enable the United States to regain a title it hasn’t held since 2012 — home of the fastest supercomputer in the world.
Summit is designed to run at a peak speed of 200 petaflops, able to crunch through as many as 200 million billion ‘floating-point operations’ — a type of computational arithmetic — every second. That could make Summit 60% faster than the current world-record holder, in China.
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