Switzerland has a new supercomputer, which was inaugurated by Federal Councilor Guy Parmelin this week at the national high-performance computing center in Lugano, reported RTS.
The computer, known as “Alps” is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. To perform the calculations that “Alps” manages in one day, would require a standard laptop 40,000 years.
The new supercomputer was developed to meet the computing requirements of science, AI in particular. The large amount of data and computations required by the neural networks at the heart of some AI models require enormous computing power. Weather, climate and medical models are some of the applications benefiting from supercomputer computing power.
“Alps” is housed in 33 cabinets that cover an area of 116 square meters. Compared to its predecessor, the supercomputer “Piz Daint,” “Alps” is twenty times more powerful, with computing power of 0.27 exaFlops.
In addition to being more powerful, Alps is significantly more efficient, consuming around 20% of the energy per Flop that its predecessor did.
Globally, Alps ranks sixth. The world’s largest computer is Frontier, a 1.2 exaFlops machine at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US. Frontier has more than four the power of Alps.
Next in line are two more US-based supercomputers: Aurora (1.0 exaFlops) and Eagle (0.56 exaFlops). In fourth place is Fugaku, a 0.44 exaFlops computer in Japan. Completing the top five is LUMI, an EU supercomputer in Finland with 0.38 exaFlops.
The inauguration of “Alps” has pushed another EU supercomputer based in Bologna down one position to seventh place. The Bologna-based supercomputer known as Leonardo has 0.24 exaFlops.
Since 1993, performance of world’s most powerful supercomputer has grown steadily in accordance with Moore’s law, doubling roughly every 14 months.
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RTS article (in French) – Take a 5 minute French test now
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