In Tennessee, supercomputers have become even more super with exascale computing (about 1018 calculations per second), now going up to a feat never before achieved that can help biofuel and bioproduct gene targeting and help scientists analyze massive data sets. Scientists were able to reach 1.88 exaops, or almost 2 billion billion calculations per second. That is not a typo – using a “mixture of numerical precisions on a new NVIDIA graphic processing unit computer chip technology called tensor cores” the research team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory were able to achieve this peak throughput faster than any previously reported science application while analyzing genomic data on the Summit supercomputer.
This could be tremendously helpful to improve biofuel production since “researchers can now identify genes controlling important traits to target biofuel and bioproduct production,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy press release. “The algorithm used in this work has been used to break the supercomputing exascale barrier for the first time anywhere in the world.”