Simulations must accommodate detail down to billionths of a meter for devices measuring meters in length. They take steps lasting billionths of a second through an event that lasts for seconds. And the lab runs different simulations over and over. Supercomputers are also in demand for health and genetics research, astrophysical modeling, aircraft and automotive design, climate change simulations and, more recently, new artificial intelligence algorithms. El Capitan will be used for some of these nonmilitary tasks, too.
AI today is used for detecting patterns like fraudulent credit card transactions and interpreting complex data like medical scans or voice commands. For nuclear weapons, it can be used for tasks like spotting unusual phenomena in a simulation that merit closer attention.
It could also be helpful in choosing which variations of a simulation to try, zeroing in faster on what's important, Goldstein said. El Capitan will take up about two tennis courts' worth of space in a Livermore data center and weigh as much as 35 school buses. If you stacked up its system boards end to end, you'd get a tower three times taller than the real El Capitan cliff in Yosemite National Park.
It'll need 30 megawatts of power -- about the same consumption as 12, homes, according to federal energy consumption rates. The allies behind the machine wouldn't reveal how many processors it'll use. Each CPU will connect to four graphics chips and to shared memory with a new, higher-speed connection technology, AMD's third-generation Infinity Architecture. Data transfer across the whole supercomputer will use a new HPE optical network that significantly shrinks the overall size of the supercomputer, said Terri Quinn, Livermore's deputy associate director for high-performance computing.
A performance level of 1 exaflops "flops" stands for floating-point operations per second is 1, times 1 petaflops, making El Capitan about 10 times faster than Summit. China dominates top supercomputers list.
Microsoft's gamble on a quantum leap. Related Topics. Published 13 November In addition, Summit has loads of superfast memory RAM available on each of its nodes, where localized calculations can take place. So-called adaptive routing means Summit has some flexibility in how it runs calculations — sort of like networks of brain cells connected to synapses. For instance, just as artificial intelligence programs are being co-opted to learn to pick out cats from images, said Jack Wells, the director of science at ORNL, these AI programs running on Summit could learn to pick out and categorize all kinds of data, ranging from those in biological sciences to physics, such as detections of neutrinos and other particles.
Summit's placement as the "world's fastest" isn't exactly official yet, because the Top list for supercomputer rankings hasn't been updated yet, but according to the Times article, it should get the top slot when the list is updated later this month. Editor's Note: This article was updated to correct the speed of the former "world's fastest supercomputer.
Jeanna is the editor-in-chief of Live Science. Previously, she was an assistant editor at Scholastic's Science World magazine. Jeanna has an English degree from Salisbury University, a master's degree in biogeochemistry and environmental sciences from the University of Maryland, and a graduate science journalism degree from New York University.
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