(IJCH) Can You Imagine 200 Petaflops? (or How ORNL Has Top Bragging Rights Again)
IJCH - Inside JaiChai's Head (Meaning: My Warped, Personal Opinions and Musings)
From the Author:
Salutations.
I am JaiChai.
And if I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you before, I'm delighted to make your acquaintance now.
I invite you to interact with everyone, learn, and have as much fun as possible!
For my returning online friends, "It's always great to see you again!"
What is a Petaflop?
A petaflop is a measurement of the speed of computer's processing capabilities.
It can be expressed as follows:
A quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations per second (FLOPS)
A thousand teraflops
10 to the 15th power FLOPS
2 to the 50th power FLOPS
Why is computing at Petaflop Speed significant?
Petaflop computing enables scientist to model complex systems much more efficiently and effectively.
No longer will it take days or weeks to process molecular designs - only to find out that the clumsy renderings are inaccurate!
Anticipated applications for petaflop computing include:
Real-time nuclear magnetic resonance DURING surgery
Astrophysical simulation
Climate change mapping,
Atmospheric modeling of environmental pollution
Machine learning
Neural networking and other AI applications.
Fast drug design
Top Bragging Rights
The world’s fastest computer is ranked twice a year by computer scientists in the US and Germany.
Top honors have gone to China for the last two years with its Sunway TaihuLight.
But now...
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory brought the Summit supercomputer online this month.
Summit
Supporters of Summit include:
IBM
NVIDIA
The State of Tennessee
DOE
And as of June 8, 2018 Summit became the fastest supercomputer in the world.
Its speed has been rated at 200 petaflops/sec.
That's 200 petaflops which equals quadrillion (two hundred thousand trillion) calculations per second.
To put it differently, everyone on earth would have to do one computation every second of every day for one year to match what Summit can do in one second!
See:
"Summit Supercomputer"
By JaiChai
Thanks for stopping by.
Truly hope to see you again!
About the Author
Believing that school was too boring, he dropped out of High School early; only to earn an AA, BS and MBA in less than 4 years much later in life – while working full-time as a Navy/Marine Corps Medic.
In spite of a fear of heights and deep water, he performed high altitude, free-fall parachute jumps and hazardous diving ops in deep, open ocean water.
After 24 years of active duty, he retired in Asia.
Since then, he's been a full-time, single papa and actively pursuing his varied passions (Writing, Disruptive Technology, Computer Science and Cryptocurrency - plus more hobbies too boring or bizarre for most folk).
He lives on an island paradise with his teenage daughter, longtime girlfriend and three dogs.
"My mind was a terrible thing to waste..." - JaiChai
