The fastest computer that has ever been built is currently the Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA. As of November 2021, Summit has a top speed of 148.6 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second), making it the fastest supercomputer in the world.
Summit uses a combination of IBM Power9 processors and NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing units (GPUs) to achieve its high performance. It also features advanced cooling systems, including liquid cooling, to keep the temperature of the processors within optimal range. Summit has a total of 4,356 nodes, each with two Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
Summit is primarily used for research in fields such as energy, medical research, and artificial intelligence. It is also used for advanced scientific simulations and data analytics, and has the ability to process large amounts of data and perform complex calculations quickly. The Summit supercomputer is considered as a major achievement in high-performance computing, and it’s considered a big step towards exascale computing.