Unlike its older brother, Sierra is dedicated to military research, more specifically to the simulation of nuclear weapons in place of underground tests, so its studies are classified material. The Sierra supercomputer is dedicated to military research. Based on Summit-like hardware, Sierra manages 94.6 petaflops. IBM is also responsible for the second most powerful supercomputer on the list, Sierra, located in California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sierra, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) Its mission is civil scientific research, and since it came into operation in 2018 it has already participated in projects such as the search for genetic variants in the population related to diseases, the simulation of earthquakes in urban environments, the study of extreme climatic phenomena, the study of materials on an atomic scale and the explosion of supernovae, among others. In addition to its large capacity, Summit is also the most energy-efficient machine in the top 10 of the world’s supercomputers.
The Summit is the world’s most powerful supercomputer today.
It occupies the equivalent of two basketball courts and achieves an impressive 148.6 petaflops thanks to its 2.41 million cores. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The world’s most powerful supercomputer today is Summit, built by IBM for the U.S. Summit, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) Today, there are at least 500 supercomputers in the world that can exceed a petaflop, or one billion flops, according to the TOP500 list drawn up by experts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Tennessee (USA).īelow we present what are currently the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world and some of their contributions to knowledge. By comparison, a current PlayStation 4 game console reaches 1.84 teraflops, almost a thousand times more. In a few decades, the strength of these giants has multiplied dramatically: in 1985 the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Cray-2, could process 1.9 billion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), or 1.9 gigaflops, the parameter used to measure the power of these machines. In our time, these words have taken on a special meaning thanks to a new class of giants-supercomputers-which nowadays are pushing the boundaries of science to levels that the human intellect would be incapable of reaching on its own. According to a quote with several origins, science advances on the shoulders of giants.