Innovations & technologies

This computer can do more calculations per second than the world's population could do in a year

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to make 200,000 trillion calculations in a single second!
Meet Summit, the world's most powerful supercomputer.
After five years of ceding dominance to China, the United States is (unofficially) back on top, thanks to this insanely fast machine.
How fast?
This is how the machine's developers at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory put it: Summit can perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second.
In other words, if a human could do one calculation per second, it would still take him or her 6.3 billion years to match that pace.
If every person on Earth did one calculation per second (and they can't), it would take the world population 305 days to do what Summit can do in one second.
"The researchers were able to solve a problem on Summit in one hour that would take 30 years on a desktop computer," Morgan McCorkle, the media manager for Oak Ridge, told CNN.