If you think your MacBook Pro laptop powered by a M1 Max processor isn’t fast enough, you may be interested in the Frontier exascale computer.
It was ranked on May 30 as the fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 speediest computers.
It’s the first true exascale machine. Exascale is the word used for a computer than can do more than a quintillion calculations per second.
It can theoretically simulate how stars explode and do calculations on subatomic particles. It will be able to use artificial intelligence to improve medical diagnosis and disease prevention, as well as study nuclear fusion.
Probably not for everyday use at the present time, the world’s fastest supercomputer can do more than a quintillion calculations per second and will typically be used in industries and scientific research that require such calculation speed.
A quintillion is 10 to the 18th power. That means it is 1 followed by 18 zeros – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The Mac can do about 11 trillion calculations per second. That’s 11,000,000,000,000.
But who’s counting?
The exascale achievement “represents an unprecedented capability for researchers around the world to use the computer to ask their specific scientific questions,” said Frontier’s project director, Justin Whitt of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The previous record-holder for speed was a supercomputer called Fugaku at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. The Frontier can achieve more than double the speed of the Fugaku.
It is believed that some Chinese supercomputers already achieve exascale performance, but they have not been involved in the ranking yet.
The Frontier computer has been in development for the past three years and it will be available for use at the end of the year.