Supercomputers are the epitome of advancements in computing technology. They are massive machines that have the capacity of performing millions of operations in a fraction of a second. Supercomputers are gigantic as they occupy large floor areas, and they also consume electricity that is high enough to power an entire building. From my last post, you might already know that the IBM Summit is the fastest supercomputer in the world presently. in this post, I will be showing you the top 5 fastest supercomputers in the world in 2018.

in case you might not know, supercomputers are special-purpose computing devices that are mainly used for computing-intensive tasks belonging to a diverse variety of fields, such as climate research and quantum mechanics. They are highly effective and efficient too.

Also read: Top 3 Advantages Of Cloud Computing For Business Today

Top 5 Fastest Supercomputers in The World 2018

Below are the top 5 fastest supercomputers in the world 2018, they are ranked from top to bottom.

IBM Summit

The IBM Summit is presently the fastest supercomputer in the world, as it takes over the crown from China’s supercomputer. The Summit is in use at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, United States. It is powered by 9,216 POWER9 CPUs (each with an astounding 22 cores) and 27,648 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Each of its nodes has 500GB of coherent memory, which is addressable by all CPUs and GPUs. There’s also 800GB of non-volatile RAM, which can be used as a burst buffer or extended memory.

With a storage capacity of 250 petabytes (1PB=10^6GB), IBM Summit can perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second.

Sunway TaihuLight

Before the enthronement of the IBM Summit, Sunway TaihuLight has been topping the list of fastest supercomputers in the world for good two years. It is located at the National Supercomputer Center in Jiangsu, China. TaihuLight is comprised of 40,960 SW26010 RISC processors, based on the Sunway architecture. Each chip has 256 processing cores, with an additional four auxiliary cores being used for system management. This brings the supercomputer’s total cor count to an insane 1,06,49,600.

Sunway TaihuLight has a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops, and a total system memory of 1.31PB.

Sierra

The third among the list of fastest supercomputers in the world in 2018 is the Sierra. The Sierra will be used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federal research facility in Livermore, California. It’s similar in architecture to the Summit, utilizing IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Sierra’s nodes are comprised of Witherspoon S922LC OpenPOWER servers, having two GPUs per CPU. These nodes are connected with Mellanox EDR Infiniband. The supercomputer has a total memory of 1.29PB and a peak speed of 125 petaflops.

Sierra has a power consumption of around 11 megawatts, and runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system.

Tianhe-2

Tainhe-2 came fourth among in this list of top 5 fastest supercomputers in the world in 2018, and it is another supercomputer built by China. With 16,000 computer nodes, each having two of Intel’s Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi coprocessor chips, Tianhe-2 packs in a whole lot of hardware. Each node has 88GB of memory, while the total CPU and coprocessor memory stands at around 1.5PB. The supercomputer has a speed of 33.86 petaflops and storage of 12.4PB. It runs Kylin Linux

Tianhe-2 is used for simulation, analysis, and government security applications.

AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure

AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) is the fifth-fastest supercomputer in the world in 2018. It is built by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. It uses Fujitsu’s Primergy CX2550 servers, along with Xeon Gold 6148 processors (each having 20 cores) and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The hardware gives it a core count of 3,91,680 and a theoretical peak performance of about 37 petaflops.

AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure uses the Infiniband EDR standard for interconnection and runs Linux.

Also read: How To Buy Cryptocurrency in Austria Using Bitpanda To Go

That sums it up in this list of top 5 fastest supercomputers in the world 2018. As technology keeps advancing, we are surely expecting the dethronement of these supercomputers that tops the list at the moment.