The 10 most expensive supercomputers on the planet

Leading this list is a Japanese supercomputer system with an investment of $ 1.2 billion.

List of the 10 most expensive supercomputers on the planet

The first supercomputer was born in the early 60s of the last century at the University of Manchester. However, you may not have the performance of it is not equal to a desktop computer at the present time.

However, in just a few decades, technology has grown so quickly that supercomputer performance has now been calculated using the petaFLOPS standard (the processing speed is equivalent to a billion billion calculations per second).

Here are 10 of the most invested supercomputers in history. Along with "huge" investment, these systems also bring about adequate performance.

1. IBM Roadrunner (USA) - 130 million USD

Roadrunner is an IBM-developed supercomputer for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. It began operating in 2008 and could reach maximum performance at 1.7 petaFLOPS. On May 25, 2008, the Roadrunner achieved 1,025 PFLOPs performance, making it the first supercomputer in the world's 500 supercomputing list to surpass the 1.0 petaFLOPS performance benchmark. In November of the same year, Roadrunner reached 1,456 PFLOPS performance.

According to the Supermicro Green500, in 2008, Roadrunner was the fourth energy-saving supercomputer in the world. The device stopped working at the end of March 2013 and was replaced by a smaller, more energy-efficient supercomputer called Cielo.

2. Vulcan BlueGene / Q (USA) - 100 million USD

Vulcal is also a supercomputer developed by IBM for the US Department of Energy (DoE) and is located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California. Vulcan has a maximum performance of 5 petaFLOPs and is currently ranked No. 9 on the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, according to Top500.org.

It is known that Vulcan was first put into operation in 2013 with its application in the field of biological research, plasma physics, meteorological science, molecular system .

3. SuperMUC (Germany) - 111 million USD

Currently ranked No. 14 on the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, SuperMUC is operated by the Leibniz Supercomputer Center (LRZ) of the Bavarian Science Institute. SuperMUC was developed by IBM, powered by the Linux operating system and contains more than 19,000 Intel and Westmere-EX processors with a maximum efficiency of 3 PFLOPS.

SuperMUC is quite outstanding at the time of publication thanks to the application of a new IBM cooling system called Aquasar (using hot water to cool the microprocessor system). This mechanism is said to reduce up to 40% of the electricity cost used to cool the system.

SuperMUC is used by European scientists in many fields including medicine, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, life science, simulating earthquakes .

4. Trinity (US) - 174 million

With the mission of ensuring US nuclear reactors operate safely, securely and effectively, the government has poured into super-supercomputer Cray to 174 million dollars to build Trinity. It is unclear when this machine is put into operation.

5. Sequoia BlueGene / Q (USA) - 250 million USD

Sequoia BlueGene / Q continues to be developed by IBM for the US National Nuclear Security Administration, NNSA. It started in June 2012 and soon became the world's most powerful computer device at the time. Over the past three years, Sequoia BlueGene / Q has remained at # 3 in the Top 500 supercomputers with a theoretical maximum speed of 20 FLOPS.

Sequoia BlueGene / Q also attracted attention because it was the first system to exceed the 10 PFLOPS performance threshold.

6. ASC Purple and BlueGene / L (US) - 290 million

ASC Purple and BlueGene / L are two computers in a supercomputing system published by the US Department of Energy in 2002. They were installed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and stopped working in 2010. In At that time, ASC Purple ranked 66th on the list of Top 500 supercomputers.

At the press conference to launch the said supercomputing system, the US Department of Energy said it had more than 1.5 times more processing power than any computer on the Top 500 list.

7. Sierra and Summit (US) - 325 million USD

Built by IBM Power Servers and NVIDIA Tesla GPU technology , two supercomputers called Sierra and Summit will be installed in 2017. They are expected to help America once again get the first place in the super field. computer.

Currently, the fastest computer in the world with 55 FLOPs is the Chinese Tinahe-2. The supercomputer of this billion-dollar country has a faster performance than a second-ranked computer. However, when completed, Sierra is said to have more than 100 FLOPS performance while this number is The Summit is 300 FLOPS.

8. Tianhe - 2 (China) - 390 million

Developed by a team of 1,300 engineers and scientists with huge investments, Tianhe-2 (roughly translated: Galaxy 2) is currently the most productive computer in the world. In fact, Tianhe-2 has held this position since 2013.

Tianhe-2 is said to be capable of performing 33,860 billion calculations per second. To get a simpler view of the capabilities of this system, we can make a small comparison. In particular, the number of calculations Tianhe-2 can make in a single hour corresponds to the number of calculations performed by 1.3 billion people in . 1,000 years.

9. Earth Simulator (Japan) - 500 million USD

Earth Simulator (ES) has been developed since 1997 at a cost of 60 billion ye (equivalent to 500 million USD). The main function of this supercomputing system is to simulate world climate simulations and measure the impact of global warming as well as geological issues.

ES was completed in 2002 and was once the fastest supercomputer in the world.

10. Fujitsu K (Japan) - 1.2 billion USD

With the biggest investment on this list, Fujitsu K is currently the 4th best performing supercomputer in the world with a maximum speed of 11 FLOPS . Reportedly, Fujitsu K has 60 times faster speed than ES. One year of operating this machine costs US $ 10 million and the amount of power is 9.89 MW, equivalent to the electricity used by 10,000 households.