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Earth Simulator

Earth Simulator was the world’s fastest supercomputer between 2002 and 2004. It was built to model the effects of global warming on our planet. 

IBM Blue Gene

Blue Gene was designed to reach petaFLOP operating speeds and managed to rank as one of the most powerful and power-efficient supercomputers in the world. 

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)

ENIAC was one of the very first supercomputers. It was created by the US Army to calculate artillery firing tables.

Sunway TaihuLight

In 2018, the Chinese supercomputer known as Sunway TaihuLight was listed as the third-fastest supercomputer in the world.

The difference engine

The Difference Engine was crafted by Charles Babbage in 1822. It is commonly referred to as the first computer.

IBM Roadrunner

IBM’s Roadrunner became the fastest supercomputer on the planet in 2008 when it managed to reach 1.456 petaFLOPS. 

Summit

Summit was the first supercomputer to hit exaflop (a quintillion operations per second) speeds. 

Sierra

This supercomputer has a very important job as it is used to manage the stockpile of US nuclear weapons to assure the safety of those weapons. 

Tianhe-2

The system sports nearly five million processor cores and 1,375 TiBs of memory, making it able to carry out over 33 quadrillion calculations per second. 

CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 was built in 1964 for $2,370,000. Despite the heavy cost, this supercomputer proved popular and 100 of them were constructed.

Cray-1

This system sported a 64-bit processor running at 80 MHz with 8MB of RAM which make it capable of a peak performance of 250 megaflops. Impressive for the time.

Frontera

The one was designed to help teams solve massively difficult problems including everything from molecular dynamics to climate simulations,

Trinity

Trinity is yet another supercomputer designed to analyse the effectiveness of nuclear weapons. 

Pangea III

Here’s an AI-optimised supercomputer with a high-performance structure but one that was said to be significantly more power-efficient than previous models. 

The Connection Machine 5

This supercomputer appeared on the set of Jurassic Park, where it masqueraded as the Park’s central control computer. 

HPC4

This one is well-known for being energy efficient while still sporting some serious processing power that includes 253,600 cores and 304,320GB of memory. 

Selene

Selene is particularly impressive when you discover that it was built in just three weeks.

Perlmutter

This supercomputer uses the power of  6,159 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 1,500 AMD Milan CPUs to analyse the effect of dark energy on the universe’s expansion.

Nvidia Venado

Venado is expected to deliver 10 exaflops of AI performance when used for advanced research on materials science and renewable energy.