Supercomputer

The world’s most powerful supercomputer has just fired up. A newcomer named Fugaku has nabbed the number one spot in the Top500 list of supercomputers, surpassing Summit, the reigning champion of the past few years.

Google has announced that it has achieved “quantum supremacy,” the point where a quantum computer successfully performs an operation considered impossible for traditional computers. But rival IBM disagrees that this has been achieved at all.

The USA has gained ground in the world supercomputer rankings, with 116 supercomputers listed among the top 500, but China continues to dominate the list with 219 top-500 supercomputers.

Supercomputers will take a huge leap forward when the “exascale” era kicks off in 2021 with the launch of Aurora. But now it looks like that world-leading machine will be usurped before it’s even set up. The Frontier system has been announced, which will boast the power of over 1.5 exaflops.

Intel and the US Department of Energy will deliver the world’s first exascale supercomputer in 2021, boosting many different fields of research. Named Aurora, the new system will be a thousand times more powerful than the petascale generation that began in 2008 and is still in wide use today.

After 12 years of work, researchers at the University of Manchester in England have completed construction of a "SpiNNaker" (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) supercomputer. It can simulate the internal workings of up to a billion neurons through a whopping one million processing units.

The the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has unveiled a machine capable of handling a staggering 200,000 trillion calculations per second (200 petaflops).

​Supercomputers are typically huge and expensive, and they take an awful lot of power to run. Looking for a cheaper way allow developers to build and test high performance computer system software, LANL turned to the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi and Australia's BitScope.​

Supercomputers and quantum computers rely on a “brute force” approach to solve problems, performing billions of calculations very quickly until they arrive at the optimal solution. But a new system has the potential to outperform them, using “magic dust” as a beacon to highlight the solution.

​To keep up with a constant flood of data, computer makers have thrown more processing cores at the problem. Forging a different path, HPE has overhauled the architecture itself to put memory at the center of the system, showcasing it through a prototype it calls The Machine.

​Twice a year, the Top500 list outlines the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and the US has always held the most units in that list until it was beaten by China in June. With the latest rankings this week, the US and China are now tied for 171 systems each within the top 500.

Russian physicists have put a computer running a consumer-level Nvidia GPU to work on equations that are normally performed using a powerful supercomputer, and found that the home PC solved them in 15 minutes – far faster than the supercomputer’s time of two or three days.