[ExI] America Now Has The Fastest Supercomputer In The World. Here’s Why That Actually Matters

[John Grigg]

"According to *The Wall Street Journal*
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-says-its-supercomputer-leaps-ahead-of-chinese-rival-1528473600>,
researchers will be using Summit to try and solve some big medical
questions, such as developing new treatments for Alzheimer’s or addiction.
And as *MIT Technology Review reported
<https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611385/americas-new-supercomputer-beats-chinas-fastest-machine-to-take-the-worlds-most/>*,
Summit marks the first time that a supercomputer was designed specifically
to work with the latest in artificial intelligence developments.

This means that even more than its incredible computing power, Summit is
built to find answers to questions in ways that people wouldn’t even think
to program into a computer. For instance, Summit’s machine learning
capabilities could be trained to go through as much medical data as could
possibly be fed to it to find never-before-detected causes or signs of
diseases.

The researchers who built Summit hope to use it as a trial for the
supercomputers of the future. If Summit is able to perform as engineers
expect it to, and the new tricks they used to build it (like the emphasis
on machine learning) pan out, then Summit could inspire computers capable
of so-called exascale computing, the name for when a computer could
complete one quintillion calculations per second, according to *MIT
Technology Review*
<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611077/the-worlds-most-powerful-supercomputer-is-tailor-made-for-the-ai-era/>.
For reference, Summit only has one-fifth the power of an exascale
supercomputer. So we’ve got a ways to go."


https://futurism.com/america-fastest-supercomputer-summit/
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