When it comes to computers,
it's all about the FLOPS or floating-point operations per second. It's
basically a unit or measure of processing performance. At present, the best
commercial computers have outputs of about 10 teraflops. With that kind of
power you'd be able to run some serious high-end programmes or play the latest
games in the highest 4K resolution and 3D rendering without any degradation in
performance. Although that may be the most an average consumer can hope for, it
still dwarfs in comparison with some of the mightiest supercomputers in the
world. Let's take a look at them. Sunway TaihuLight This supercomputer - the
planet's most powerful computer at the moment - was developed in China with the
computing power of a colossal (93 petaflops) 93,014.6 tflops/s or 93 trillion
teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark. The supercomputer was created by the
National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology
(NRCPC) and is located in the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, China.
With an efficiency of 6,051.30 MFLOPS/W, this juggernaut is also the fourth
most energy-efficient supercomputer.
Tianhe-2
The Tianhe-2 - also known as MilkyWay-2 - holds the second place in this
regard. Another hard-hitter from China, this supercomputer is capable of 33.8
petaflop/s, although the Tianhe-2 could theoretically reach 54.9 petaflop/s.
Using Intel technology, this computer has 3.1 million cores and 1,024,000 GB of
internal memory. The Tianhe-2 is located at the National Super Computer Centre
in Guangzhou, China. It was built with the combined effort of China's National
University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and an IT firm called Inspur. Titan
Located in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, US, Titan holds the
third place. Developed by Cray Inc, this supercomputer has 5,60,640 cores, with
a computing capacity of 17.5 petaflop/s, and 7,10,144 GB memory. The US
Department of Energy footed the $60 million (Rs 401 crore approximately)
development price tag.
Source: DNA-12th February,2017
