Can U.S. Supercomputers Regain Top Title?

It's a sad day when the U.S. realizes it's no longer the leader of the pack. But the title is something that the government will pay well to regain.

Earlier this week, commemorating the opening day of the SC14 Supercomputing Show in New Orleans, Monday Nov. 17, a team of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee and German tech company Prometeus issued the 2014 list of the top 500 most powerful computing systems in the world. And though the race was close, China's massive Tianhe-2 supercomputer topped the list at No.1, for the fourth time in a row, leaving the U.S. in second and third place.

Over the past five years, the list has seen little change in the top 10 ranks, with only the no. 10 spot changing hands in recent years. According to the team compiling the list, in recent years the performance growth rate of the competitors has slowed by roughly 55 percent than what it was from previous studies spanning 1994 to 2008. And organizers say that even top competitors "exhibit a noticeable slowdown in growth, compared to the previous long-term trend."

But that's something the U.S. is looking to change. Hoping to change the dynamics of the competition, and reinvigorate the supercomputing industry of the world, , last Friday Nov. 14, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $325 million to IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox Technologies to build two new supercomputers, expected to be run five to seven times faster than current systems in place. And these two new systems are likely to be the game-changers researchers have been waiting for.

Replacing the world's second fastest supercomputer, Titan, at the Oak Ridge National Lab will be the "Summit" system. And replacing the number three spot, Sequoia, at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab will be the new "Sierra" system. And IBM officials says that both will have peak performances of more than 100 petaflops, a staggering 182 percent faster than Tianhe-2.

"Summit builds on the hybrid multi-core architecture that the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) successfully pioneered with Titan" director of the Summit project, Buddy Bland says. "The combination of very large memory per node and the powerful IBM POWER and NVIDIA processors provides an ideal platform for data analysis, as well as computation."

And while the supercomputers will boast speeds and memory that will likely allow the United States to again regain their place at the top of the 500 list, researchers say that the true value of the project lies in the future of science. By creating far faster computing technology, not only will the U.S. turn heads with their speed in the technology sector, but will also allow other areas of science to thrive.

"Summit [and Sierra] will break new ground and bring new understanding to many areas of science and engineering such as combustion science, nuclear power, biofuels, fusion energy, climate change, solar energy, energy storage, and catalysis, to name a few" official Jim Hack from Oak Ridge National Laboratory says. "High-performance computing has become a key part of technology advancement and scientific discovery, [and] Summit will allow us to continue in this mission through the end of the decade."