Curious Droid presents the top 10 fastest computers in the world how do they compare to a PC or iPad pro if you need to model things like the world’s weather, nuclear reactions, molecular dynamics or simulate the first few seconds after the Big Bang you’re gonna need some pretty serious computing power but just how much more powerful other top 10 supercomputers compared to the PC on your desktop or an iPad Pro for example in this video we’ll see just how powerful supercomputers have become but first we need to know how do you measure a computer’s performance there are lots of ways to do this but the most common high-performance systems and the simplest to understand is to measure how many calculations per second they’re capable of the unit of measurement is called the flop or floating point operation a flop is a calculation that would be even adding subtracting multiplying or dividing two numbers with decimal points in them for example 10.545 multiplied by 6.387 would be a single flop modern computers can do with billions of times a second at the time of making this video in February 2016 the latest iPad pro with the A9x dual core CPU is capable of around about gigaFLOPS that’s one and a half thousand million flops per second a typical $1,000 PC with a single Intel 5820 6 core CPU is capable of around 100 gigaFLOPS 66 times more than an iPad Pro you can measure the performance of your own Intel based PC or Mac or mobile device with the same type of Linpack software as a used to benchmark supercomputers just look for the link in the description of this video because supercomputers are so much more powerful they are measured in PetaFLOPS one PetaFLOP is equal to 1,000 teraFLOPs and one teraFLOP is equal to 1000 GigaFLOPs and remember our PC was 100 gigaFLOPS and the iPad Pro gigaFLOPs.

A petaFLOP is equal to about 1 million billion calculations per second one estimate suggests that it would take a human about 32 million years to complete the same task now we know one everyday computing device that you or I own is capable of let’s see how it compares to the top 10 supercomputers in the world. All the figures given were correct as of November 2015 and gathered from the top500 list of supercomputers at number ten we have the Stampede supercomputer the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in United States this supercomputer is made by Dell and has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs that’s equivalent of 51,000 of our $1000 PC’s or million iPad pros it has 464,462 processing cores and 192Tb of RAM and consumes approximately megawatts of power at maximum performance at number nine we have been Shaheen 2 at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in saudi arabia this supercomputer is made by Cray and has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs that’s equivalent of 55,000 of our PCs or million iPad pros it costs approximately $51M to buy and install it has 196,608 processing cores and 790 terabytes of RAM consumes a maximum power of megawatts at number eight is the Hazel Hen at the HLRS in Stuttgart Germany this is another super computer made by Cray Inc and it has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs and is the fastest supercomputer in the European Union that’s equipped to 56,000 of our PC’s or million iPad pros it has 185,088 processing cores and consumes a maximum of megawatts of power at number seven we have the Piz Daint at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center at Lugano Switzerland the Piz Daint named after a nearby mountain is yet another Cray built supercomputer has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs thats equivalence of 62,000 of our PCs or million iPad pros it has 115,984 processing cores and 169Tb of RAM and consumes a maximum of megawatts of power at number six is the trinity at the Los Alamos National Laboratory New Mexico United States yes this is yet another Cray supercomputer and is a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs 81,000 PCs or million iPad pros it has 301,056 processing cores and cost approximately $174M.

At number five we have the Mira Bluegene/Q at the US Department of Energy Argonne National Laboratory Illinois United States this supercomputer was built by IBM and has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs that’s the equivalent of 85,000 of our PCs or million iPad pro’s it has 780,432 processing cores 768 terabytes of RAM and consumes a maximum of megawatts power no cost has been released by IBM but it was believed to have been around $50M at number four is the K computer at the RIKEN advanced Institute for computational science at Kobe Japan built by Fujitsu the K supercomputer has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs that the equivalent of 105,000 of our PC’s or 7 million iPad Pro’s it has 705,024 processing cores and 1,410 terabytes of RAM and consumes a maximum of 12 megawatts of power to give you an idea of a the perforemance of this machine simulation of the human heart which had taken two years was accomplishing just one day on the K computer at number three is the Sequoia Bluegene/Q at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory California United States the number three on the top 10 list is built by IBM and has a maximum Linpack performace of petaFLOPs that’s equivalent of 171,000 of our PC’s or million iPad pros it has 1,572,864 processing cores 1,572 terabytes of RAM and consumes a maximum power of seven point eight mega watts the primary use of a Sequoia is for nuclear weapons simulation but it would also be used to study of the human genome, climate change and astronomy to name but a few at number two is the Titan Oak Ridge National Laboratory Tennessee United States another Cray built supercomputer is at number two on the list and has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs that the equivalent of 175,000 thousand of our PCs million iPad Pro’s it has 560,640 processing cores 710 terabytes of RAM and consumes a maximum of mega watts power at the number one slot on the top 10 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is the Tianhe-2 or Milky Way 2 have a national Supercomputer Center at Guangzhou City Guangdong Province China this was built by the Chinese national university of defense technology and has a maximum Linpack performance of petaFLOPs thats the equivalent of 338,000 our PCs or mIllion iPad Pro’s it has 3,120,000 processing cores and 1024 terabytes of RAM and consumed a maximum power of megawatts the Tianhe-2 has been a top supercomputer for the past three years running now in the top 500 list which comes out twice a year so where do we go from here well if anyone can figure out how to build a real quantum computer IBM have previously stated that if one could be made with just 50 quantum bits or qubits that could detect both types of errors and scale to large systems no combination of today’s top 500 supercomputers could successfully outperform it until then we’ll look forward to the first 1,000 petaflop or 1 exaFLOP machine in hopefully around 2025 thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed the video if you did then don’t forget to thumbs up and subscribe for more and if you have any ideas for videos you like to see in place let us know in the comments below