USA to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer

Computers have evolved at a mind-boggling pace in the last three decades. The rise of the personal computing industry put ever more powerful computers within the reaches of regular people. However, supercomputers are a different story altogether. Supercomputers are computers with very high levels of computational power, usually millions of times that of the usual PC. The current record for the world’s fastest supercomputer is held by Summit, developed by IBM, which is capable of 200 petaflops. Flops (floating point operations per second) are a measure of computer performance.

That is about to be surpassed by orders of magnitude.

Intel and Cray are joining hands in the development of what could very well be the most powerful supercomputer in the world, capable of performing exaflops. While the average PC is capable of doing a few hundred gigaflops, a thousand of those make a teraflop and thousands of that add up to a petaflop. Finally, a thousand petaflops makeup an exaflop. Such astounding computational power has numerous applications in astrophysics, materials research, simulations of weather models to study climate change, development of artificial intelligence and machine learning based applications, quantum physics and so on.

The new computational beast will be named Aurora and would cost a whopping $500 million. It is being built for the United States Department of Energy and would be ready by 2021. China, however, is planning to develop its own exaflop capable supercomputer by 2020. Before IBM’s Summit seized the title of the fastest, Chinese supercomputers were consistently ranked as the fastest. The brewing supercomputer arms race between the two superpowers keeps getting interesting.