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posted by martyb on Saturday June 09 2018, @12:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-can-it-play-Crysis? dept.

Since 2013, Chinese machines have occupied the number one slot in rankings of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Now America is back on top again. Engineers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee have just unveiled Summit, a supercomputer with enough processing power to surpass the current record holder, China's Sunway TaihuLight.

The new machine is capable, at peak performance, of 200 petaflops—200 million billion calculations a second. To put that in context, everyone on earth would have to do a calculation every second of every day for 305 days to crunch what the new machine can do in the blink of an eye. Summit is 60 percent faster than the TaihuLight and almost eight times as fast as a machine called Titan, which is also housed at Oak Ridge and held the US supercomputing speed record until Summit's arrival.

[...] Jack Wells of Oak Ridge says the experience of building Summit, which fills an area the size of two tennis courts and carries 4,000 gallons of water a minute through its cooling system to carry away about 13 megawatts of heat, will help inform work on exascale machines, which will require even more impressive infrastructure. Things like Summit's advanced memory management and the novel, high-bandwidth linkages that connect its chips will be essential for handling the vast amounts of data exascale machines will generate. Scientists at the national lab say they've already leveraged Summit's AI smarts to conduct what is effectively an exascale comparative genomics calculation. Thanks to these and other advances, Summit will help us reach even more impressive peaks of computing power.

The world's most powerful supercomputer

Also Covered by

Move Over, China: U.S. Is Again Home to World's Speediest Supercomputer (The New York Times)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Launches America's New Top Supercomputer for Science

The World's Most Powerful Supercomputer Is an Absolute Beast (GIZMODO)


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  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:40AM (6 children)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:40AM (#690623) Journal

    ddn't we just decide no one knows what AI actually *is* [soylentnews.org]?

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:42AM (#690624)

    Nah, I know it when I see it...

  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday June 09 2018, @02:49AM (2 children)

    by mhajicek (51) on Saturday June 09 2018, @02:49AM (#690649)

    Perhaps we need to use an AI to identify it?

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @03:17AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @03:17AM (#690657)

      AI, Porn, Whatever,...
      I know it when I see it!

      • (Score: 3, TouchĂ©) by MostCynical on Saturday June 09 2018, @03:44AM

        by MostCynical (2589) on Saturday June 09 2018, @03:44AM (#690663) Journal

        If it is mine, it is erotica.
        If it is *yours*, it is porn.

        --
        "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:53AM

    by anubi (2828) on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:53AM (#690723) Journal

    ELIZA [wikipedia.org] ? Is that you?

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:37PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:37PM (#690883) Journal

    The answer seems to be, "If you know how it works well enough to build it, it's not intelligent.". This has been the traditional way of handling AI all the way back to the 1950's. Things that everyone agreed would be proof of intelligence get redefined as not intelligent when we learn how to program them.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.