Can IBM’s ‘SUMMIT’ Supercomputer Predict the Future?

Scientists have high hopes for the world’s fastest computer, which is now up and running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee after its June 8 launch.

This stat puts things in perspective:

A $200-million, water-cooled monster that covers an area the size of two tennis courts, the computer, dubbed “Summit,” has been clocked at handling 200 quadrillion calculations a second (or 200 petaflops). That’s more than twice as fast as the previous record-holder, China’s 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight, and so fast that it would take every person on Earth doing one calculation a second for 305 days to do what Summit can do in a single second.

the NBC News article continues,

Roughly 10 percent of people who take an opioid painkiller slip into addiction, says Dan Jacobson, a computational biologist at the laboratory. “That screams genetics to us — otherwise everybody would get addicted,” he says. He and his team plan to use Summit to compare the genetic profiles of 600,000 individuals — in this case U.S. military veterans — against clinical records showing whether they were prescribed opioids and if they became addicted.

 

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