How good is your hardware? With a modern desktop computer or notebook, today you can easily surpass the computing power a large computer had 25 or 30 years ago. And those were real giants back then! A crazy thought, right? But it gets even crazier when you look at what supercomputers can do today. This then goes into the realm of the unimaginable and makes it curious whether we too will eventually use this technique.

Until recently, the most powerful computer in the world was in China and no ordinary person would have expected that title in a short time back to another supercomputer that can do much more. But that has happened now and so now the US can say with good conscience: Our Computer * Summit * is the most powerful in the world! For comparison, the Chinese supercomputer, which was previously regarded as the most powerful, managed a computing power of 93 petaflops. * Summit * now has 200 Petaflops!

But what does that mean exactly and how can the speed be compared for us? Engadget tried to make it clear as follows: * Summit * solves a complicated and complex math problem in just one hour, which would take a normal computer about 30 years. Already very impressive, right? Even more impressive, however, is the construction of Summit. Behind this name hide 4608 servers that fill an area of ​​two tennis courts. About 9,000 processors drive the supercomputer and more 27,000 Nvidia Tesla V-100 graphics cards are installed. Of course, that much power also needs cooling – and that’s guaranteed by 15,000 liters of water per minute. The electricity bill is not exactly small at * Summit *: consumption is comparable to that of 8000 households.

And what do you do with such a supercomputer? In the future, Summit will support research in various areas, focusing on artificial intelligence. Now many research areas are possible positive that could not be tackled without Summit.