A personal computer or laptop can be found in almost every home. Those who buy the latest processors and video chips think that they have the most powerful computer in the world, at least according to its characteristics. But personal computers are still a long way from supercomputers.

These machines are monsters of titanic computation, capable of processing a quadrillion operations per second. They seem distant from the average person on the planet, but we often see the results of their work. Of course, you do not need a super-powered computer for online casino Bollywood games. Still, it is pretty helpful technology, from the ability to quickly find information on the Internet to the development of new medical drugs and flying vehicles that we are all actively using.



The term "supercomputers" was first used in the 1960s. They were the primary computing machines used for various academic, government, and scientific projects in the United States. In the 90s, there was a lot of talk about the "collapse of supercomputers" as many companies left this market. However, for example, Cray, which had been producing high-performance computers since the 60s, is still developing today.

Initially, supercomputers were used for military purposes and used to develop nuclear weapons. Nowadays, they are in demand in areas where computer simulation is used, and processing vast amounts of data in real-time are required. Moreover, if a problem can be solved by trying many values, such devices show high efficiency in solving it.

Supercomputers, or as they are also called, "number crunchers," are nowadays used in the following sciences and directions:

- Biology;
- physics;
- meteorology;
- cryptography;
- linguistics;
- design in mechanical engineering, construction, aircraft engineering;
- artificial neural networks and artificial intelligence, etc.


The development of information technologies and devices with ultra-high computational capabilities has led to the emergence of such sciences as computational chemistry, computational linguistics, etc.

Thanks to the efficient operation of the world's most powerful supercomputers, we have accurate weather forecasts and revolutionary medical capabilities. In particular, the ability to diagnose and treat cancer. They can quickly process millions of case histories and diagnoses, identify new patterns of disease, and, as a result, create new therapies. In addition, the calculation of a vast number of chemical compounds makes it possible to form the basis for producing innovative medical drugs.

The more rapid development of powerful computers and system units is facilitated by digitalization and the era of the digital economy. As a result, multimillion-dollar sums are allocated for the development and creation of supercomputers, as a result of which the performance of such machines is noticeably increasing every year.

How is the performance of supercomputers measured?

The computing power of the world's most powerful computers in 2022 is measured in "flops" - the number of floating-point operations per second. Typically, computers use MIPS - the number of operations per second expressed in millionths - but since "number crunchers" most often work with high-precision real numbers instead of integers, FLOPS is the optimal measure of computing. It is an approximate but objective criterion for comparing robust computer systems.

So which is the most powerful computer in the world right now?

DELL HPC5

The Dell PowerEdge HPC5 supercomputer is Italy's largest oil and gas company, Eni S.p.A (capitalization as of 2019: €50 billion) is located in the Eni data center. HPC5 is one of the most effective and resilient computer systems globally, used mainly for new energy research.

With a performance of 35.45 petaflops (51.7 in theory), it is the most powerful system in our 2022 ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers in commercial use at a customer site. It runs on Intel Xeon Gold processors (for a total of 669,760 cores) and NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics cores.

JUWELS BOOSTER MODULE BULLSEQUANA XH200

The JUWELS computer, created by Atos, is the latest list. The BullSequana was recently installed at the Jülich Research Center (Germany, founded December 11, 1956) and is the most powerful system in Europe, with a performance of 44.1 petaflops HPL.

SELENE NVIDIA

It is one of the most powerful supercomputers globally as of 2022 is used by NVIDIA Corp, known for making graphics cards for personal computers at various price points. With a total capitalization of $251.31 billion, Selene reached 63.4 petaflops of power on the HPL benchmark in recent tests, nearly doubling its previous result (the last figure was 27.6 petaflops).

NVIDIA unveiled its Selene artificial intelligence supercomputer in June 2020, building and running it in less than a month. Critical applications include developing and testing various systems, internal artificial intelligence development, and chips.

SUNWAY TAIHULIGHT SUNWAY MPP

This computer was built by the National Research Center for Parallel Computing and Technology of China and installed in the National Supercomputer Center of Wuxi. It previously ranked #1 in the official Top500 ranking for two years (2016-2017). Since then, however, its position has wobbled somewhat.

The performance of the supercomputer reaches 93 petaflops in the HPL test. It runs on Sunway SW26010 processors with 10,649,600 cores. The theoretical interpretation of the Chinese supercomputer is 125.4 petaflops.

You can find more about supercomputers and other news from the world of technology at this link.

SIERRA IBM POWER SYSTEMS S922LC

Sierra opens the top three most powerful computers of 2022. This supercomputer model belongs to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Lawrence National Laboratory (LLNL) (California) is responsible for the reliability and security of nuclear weapons of the United States. This laboratory is also home to the National Laser Fusion Reaction Complex.

The Sierra supercomputer has 94.6 petaflops of performance, 4,320 nodes, 1,572,480 cores, two Power9 processors, and four Tesla GPUs. Its architecture is similar to that of the supercomputer in the No. 2 position (Summit).

Sierra was also ranked 15th on the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.

SUMMIT IBM POWER SYSTEMS AC92

The second most potent computer globally in terms of performance characteristics in 2022 is the Summit model, based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee. The lab conducts research in neutron physics, materials science, and energy.

Two teams working on the development of Summit received the prestigious Gordon Bell Award for Outstanding Achievement in High-Performance Computing, commonly referred to as the "Nobel Prize in Supercomputing."

SUPERCOMPUTER FUGAKU

So, the world's top computer is Fugaku. Its maximum performance is 442 PFLOPS (potential peak - 537), 26 PFLOPS more than in June 2020, and three times faster than the Summit system. This result was achieved by increasing the number of cores to 7630848 (Arm A64FX processors). The computer was built by Fujitsu and is located at the RIKEN Computational Science Center in Kobe, Japan.

Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Center, said that they had conquered this achievement because they were "finally able to use the whole machine to the maximum, not just a significant part of it." At the same time, Matsuoka added: "I don't think we're capable of improving anything else about it."

Fugaku leads in every benchmark known to date: Top500, HPL-AI, HPCG, Graph500. In total, Fugaku's power exceeds that of the four supercomputers below in the rankings combined. It will be operational in 2021.