The U.S. is back on top of the list of the world's most powerful computer systems, as revealed by the Top500 ranking released recently. This is also the first instance of a supercomputer crossing the exascale ceiling in a benchmark test.
Supercomputers are used for crunching numbers and data for advanced scientific applications ranging from molecular modeling to weather forecasting, quantum mechanics to nuclear fusion research, and much more. While calculations on a regular computer are measured in million instructions per second (MIPS), those on supercomputers are measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) and currently supercomputers carry out hundreds of petaflops (10 15) every second.
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