We are often surprised by the speed of the latest computer or smartphone, but the supercomputers that do the world's craziest calculations will always put our dinky consumer electronics to shame.
These supercomputers are incredibly powerful. They are made up of giant mainframes linking tens of thousands of processors to achieve incredible computing speeds, measured in petaflops. One petaflop equals 1 quadrillion calculations per second. For comparison, that's more than 12,000 times faster than a MacBook Pro.
The United States is currently home to the world's fastest supercomputer, Titan, according to the Top 500 List released today.
The Titan supercomputer, housed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee reached a speed of 17.59 petaflops to knock another American supercomputer, Sequoia, out of the top spot to No. 2.
#10 DARPA Trial Subset
Speed: 1.52 petaflops
Country: United States
IBM's DARPA Trial Subset machine is new to the Top 10 list. It was No. 23 when it was ranked in June.
#9 Fermi
Speed: 1.73 petaflops
Country: Italy
Date Created: 2012
The Fermi supercomputer is owned by Cineca, Italy's computing consortium of 54 universities. It can be found on the Western outskirts of the Italian city of Bologna. Research performed on Fermi will contribute to advances in sustainable energy, transportation, climate change, and health.
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#8 Tianhe-1A
Speed: 2.56 petaflops per second
Date Created: 2010
Country: China
Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin and is used to carry out research in petroleum exploration, solar energy, and perform aircraft simulation. China is currently developing the Tianhe-2 that they claim could hit a speed of 100 petaflops per second by 2015.
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