The United States beat Japan to top the list of the most powerful computer systems in the world this year: it’s the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The US once again tops the list of the most powerful computer systems in the world, as evidenced by the recently released Top 500. This is the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US.
We also wrote that a super-fast 3D printer has been created, which we called revolutionary. For example, Frontier edged out the Fugaku system at the Riken Computing Science Center in Japan, which had been in first place for two years. This is also the first time that a supercomputer has broken the exascale ceiling in a benchmark test.
This means that while computing on a regular computer is measured in millions of operations per second (MIPS), computing on supercomputers is measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
Currently, supercomputers perform hundreds of petaflops (10-15) every second. Supercomputers are used to process numbers and data for advanced scientific applications ranging from molecular modeling to weather forecasting. Or from quantum mechanics to nuclear fusion research and more.
To ensure that the supercomputer does not overheat, 6,000 gallons (22,712 liters) of water are pumped through these cabinets every minute using four pumps. The Japanese supercomputer Fugaku, due to the loss of terabytes of research data and a backup error, now ranks second in the Top 500 list. In third place is the HPE Cray system, LUMI, operating in Europe.