Super

I noticed the other day that the US has quietly overtaken China in the supercomputer arms-race. China has held the record for the most powerful computer for a couple of years now, their "TaihuLight" machine weighed in at an astonishing 93 Peta-FLOPS. "Peta" means 10 raised to the power of 15 or a thousand million, million and FLOPS stands for "Floating Point Operations per Second". That's a lot of calculations! If a single Human attempted to do the same number of arithmetic operations that this machine does in one second, it would take a length of time equivalent to the remaining life of our solar system. The Sun would have swelled into a red-giant and destroyed the Earth long before the Human calculator had finished, and I thought scoring a darts match was challenging!

Now, the US has regained the title with their "Summit" machine at Oak Ridge. Built by IBM but using a variety of technologies this new machine ups the ante to 200 Peta-FLOPS, the kind of power needed to do some pretty impossible stuff, like designing fusion-powered reactors or modelling our climate at a planetary scale. In this current era of a renaissance of interest in AI systems it would be fascinating to try out some of the chunkier models on such a machine. I'm sure scientists can't wait to do things like model genes at molecular scale to help predict cancers and then find suitably "shaped" drugs to combat the multitude of different types, anyway, I hope that's what it'll be used for rather than the usual boring old "war-games"..

The race to achieve a machine capable of "Exascale" computing (which is what Human brains achieve at the neuron-level) is most definitely still alive and might even be achieved in the next year or two, bring it on!