the race for the world's fastest supercomputer is odds China held the lead for the last five years but the United States has surged ahead with summit it's a 200 million dollar government-funded supercomputer vote for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in partnership with IBM and Nvidia but what is a supercomputer today's supercomputers are comprised 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 three million calculations per second well that may sound impressive it
is tens of thousands of times slower than an iPhone if you have a smart phone it is more powerful than the supercomputer that they had back in 1995 do a human genome today summit consists of over 36,000 processors from IBM and Nvidia that can perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second in an hour summit takes up 5,600 square feet of floor space and has nearly 200 miles of cable it uses 4,000 gallons of water per minute to stay cool and consumes enough power to run 8,000 homes but why do we need such fast computers it has
tangible results in terms of how it helps society at large it will translate into better appliances better security systems better delivery of power more efficient homes every aspect of life will change supercomputers are used across all sectors forecasting weather and climate trends simulating nuclear tests performing pharmaceutical research and cracking encryption keys summit is the first supercomputer designed for artificial intelligence applications and researchers plan to use summit for AI projects that could identify genetic predispositions to cancer or opiate addiction by surpassing China the US has escalated the tech rivalry between the two countries there's no question
race design but this is not the space race this is the race to knowledge but faster supercomputers are already on the horizon the European Union Japan and China are all developing machines that they say will outperform summit the next big frontier is exascale computing that is computers that can perform a billion times a billion calculations per second the use of this machine is only going to be limited by the imagination or the scientists will have access to this machine hey there thanks for checking out CNBC on YouTube be sure to subscribe to stay up-to-date on
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