World's next most powerful supercomputer

How fast could a powerful supercomputer run? In a billion FLOPs and that’s the goal of the soon to be the fastest supercomputer in the world. However, the world’s soon to be, fastest supercomputer is named Aurora and will be capable of unparallel supercomputing power. It will be able to perform one quintillion operations per second. Quintillion? Yes! And that’s a 10 with 18 zeros behind it (10,000,000,000,000,000,000). Seems like you still confused about its speed estimation? Yes, you should but don’t worry, Let’s bring it down and do a comparison with a regular desktop computer. In contrast, Aurora is a million times faster than a regular desktop computer. And also promising even a new approach to supercomputing.

Moreover, the supercomputer will sit outside of town, just some few miles from Chicago, in the Argonne National Laboratory. But most noteworthy, the project promises to address and solve a lot of man’s most pressing computational needs using a newer approach (Artificial Intelligence).

Who is powering the project?

Notwithstanding, a powerhouse trio is the force behind this $500 million project i.e. (The money bag, the speed gear, and the craftsman). Funded by the U.S Department of Energy and contracted by chip giant Intel and Settle-based high-performance supercomputer manufacturer Cray. A nice collaboration as Intel and Cray have had a longstanding partnership in building advanced supercomputers. Although, the original plan for Aurora was a less powerful system with the aim to achieve regular supercomputing goals. But after a government mandate in 2017 which issued more attention on high-performance computing in the U.S. The project was revisited and mapped out for a greater purpose. This led to the birth of an idea world’s fastest supercomputer and Aurora will be set for use in 2021.

What new feature is Aurora bringing to supercomputing

Aurora will use a variety of technology including Intel future generation Xeon Scalable processors and optane memory. Unlike the current most powerful supercomputer in the world “SUMMIT”. Aurora is coming as a game changer with an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) capabilities. This will enable it to analyze data and learn from it.

Purpose of Aurora

First of all, the Aurora project is hoped to be used for scientific purposes and not for nuclear weapons simulation. This is plausible as the project is currently built and will be housed in Argonne National Laboratory. Which is not a military base and no plans are being made for now to turn it otherwise. Nevertheless, Aurora will be built for next-generation artificial intelligence and will accelerate scientific discovery. Furthermore, it will also address real-world problems, such as:

Discovery new approaches for drug response prediction
Accelerating medical treatment
Cancer research
Improving extreme weather forecasting
Understanding the universe better
Discovery materials for the creation of more efficient organic solar cells.

Although, there’s no telling for now how long Aurora will dominate and reign as the world’s fastest supercomputer. Several nations have supercomputers and the quest to have the fastest has been a goal with efforts to achieving it. Hopefully, the U.S. will hold the top two spots of the world’s fastest computer upon completion of Aurora. Moreover, rankings toggle frequently and China still dominates with a total of 227 supercomputers in the world as compared to the U.S with just 109. Consequently, supercomputing is not all about who owns more or the most powerful. But having a powerful supercomputer is all about the difference it can make and achieve.

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Team techablaze