The 10 most expensive supercomputers that amaze with their power

The first Atlas supercomputer appeared in the early 60s and was installed at the University of Manchester. It was at times less powerful than modern home computers. Our review contains a dozen of the most powerful supercomputers in the history. However, due to the rapidly developing technologies in this area, these powerful machines become obsolete in an average of 5 years.

The performance of modern supercomputers is measured in petaflops, a unit of measurement that shows how many floating—point operations a computer performs per second. Today we will talk about the ten most expensive modern supercomputers.

1. IBM Roadrunner (USA) — $ 130 million

2. Vulcan BlueGene/Q (USA) — $ 100 million

3. SuperMUC (Germany) — 111 million dollars

The system was created by IBM, runs on a Linux shell, contains more than 19,000 Intel and Westmere-EX processors, and has a peak performance of just over 3 petaflops. SuperMUC is used by European researchers in the fields of medicine, astrophysics, quantum chromodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, genome analysis and earthquake modeling.

4. Trinity (USA) — $ 174 million

Trinity, which is currently under construction, will be a joint project of the Sandia National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory under the program of Predictive Modeling and computational data processing of the National Nuclear Safety Administration.

5. Sequoia BlueGene/Q (USA) — $ 250 million

The computer works stably at 10 petaflops. Sequoia is used to support various scientific applications, the study of astronomy, energy, the human genome, climate change and the development of nuclear weapons.

6. ASC Purple and BlueGene/L (USA) — 290 million dollars

ASC Purple was built for the fifth stage of the Predictive Modeling and computational data processing program of the US Department of Energy, as well as the National Nuclear Safety Administration. Its purpose was to simulate and replace real tests of weapons of mass destruction. BlueGene/L was used to predict global climate change.

7. Sierra and Summit (USA) — $ 325 million

Currently, the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Chinese Tianhe-2, which is capable of reaching a power of 55 petaflops, which is twice as much as the device in second place in the list. Sierra will give out more than 100 petaflops, while Summit will be able to develop 300 petaflops.

Sierra, which will be installed at Livermore National Laboratory, will ensure the safety and effectiveness of the country's nuclear program. Summit will replace the outdated Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will be designed to test and support scientific applications around the world.

8. Tianhe-2 (China) — $ 390 million

9. Earth Simulator (Japan) — 500 million dollars

ES was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004, and it still serves to work with global climate models, to assess the effects of global warming and to assess the problems of geophysics of the Earth's crust.

10. Fujitsu K (Japan) — $ 1.2 billion