Computer science, the main discipline that led us from an age of change to a “change of age” has crossed a new frontier. It can now operate on “exaflops”.
Increasingly, the development of science is based on “simulation models” that demand greater computing capacity. The more precise and detailed the “models” are, the better results can be obtained in the discipline under study
For this reason, today, the production of the best science is in the hands, to a great extent, of those who have the best computer equipment.
There is a publication that tracks the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. A recent article, published in the prestigious financial newspaper “Financial Times”, gives an account of the two annual reports that are published on the subject.
According to this report, the most powerful computer that has ever existed is located on the “campus” of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (of the US Department of Energy), and was baptized “Frontier”.
It is a $600 million machine with 74 cabinets (each one weighs as much as a truck) cooled by more than 22,700 liters of water per minute and connected by almost 145 kilometers of cable, capable of processing a billion billion operations per second (a measure known in computing as exaflop)
The processing speed of these supercomputers accelerates regiularly. In the last 7 years it grew 10 times, from the order of 100 million billion to a billion billion per second.
In total, 173 of these super machines are in China, 35% more than the United States has (128). In this way, the Asian country reaffirms its leadership in a critical field for scientific and technological progress, an area in which it reveals primacy since the 2000s.
It is interesting to note that, even though these computers have a special application in science, half of them are in the hands of industry, a fact that once again demonstrates the importance of public-private articulation in strengthening the innovation ecosystem for a modern economy.
These super-equipment’s, applied to the formulation of climate, energy, aerospace or biomedical “models” will allow the development of more appropriate solutions for the challenges we face in all these fields.
For this reason, it is necessary to promote, through international cooperation, mechanisms that ensure healthy competition to develop more and better supercomputers, preventing geopolitical tensions from delaying progress and solutions we seek.
The COVID 19 pandemic has taught us, in a very painful way, how much we can gain by sharing information and working collaboratively and how many lives are at stake when we act against common sense.
A civilization that has managed to develop the technology on which these supercomputers are based should be able to rescue the ethic of collaboration to strengthen the provision of global public goods.
