U.S. Winning Supercomputer Race, For Now.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Algorithmic Warfare

With the unveiling of Summit--which has a peak performance of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second--the United States is once again in possession of the world's speediest supercomputer.

The system--which was built for the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory--surpassed China's Sunway TaihuLight in capability, according to the TOP500, an organization that ranks the top 500 supercomputers around the globe and releases new lists twice a year. The TaihuLight, which held the top position for two years, was developed by the country's National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, and installed at the National Super-computing Center in Wuxi, the TOP500 said in a news release.

Summit--which was built by IBM and includes six Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators manufactured by NVIDIA, a Santa Clara, California-based technology company--can be used to perform a variety of applications, said Paresh Kharya, director of accelerated computing at NVIDIA.

"The most exciting thing about Summit is... the promise that it holds for the scientists and the researchers who are working to solve grand challenges using this instrument," he said during a call with reporters in June when the system was unveiled. "It delivers giant leaps in application performance."

It has eight times more performance than the United States' previous fastest supercomputer, Titan, Kharya said. Summit--which weighs as much as a commercial jet and fills two tennis courts worth of space--is also highly efficient in terms of power consumption, he added.

But while the United States may have the fastest computer for now, China is fast on its heels.

Additionally, the United States still lags behind the Asian nation in terms of the number of most advanced supercomputers it owns, according to the TOP500.

"Despite the ascendance of the U.S. at the top of the rankings, the country now claims only 124 systems on the list, a new low," the organization said. "Just six months ago, the U.S. had 145 systems. Meanwhile, China improved its representation to 206 total systems, compared to 202 on the last list."

Other supercomputer leaders include Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, it added.

Elsa Kania, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security's technology and national security program, said it's difficult to measure which country is winning the supercomputer race simply by noting which has the...