IBM and the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced the supercomputer Summit stating that it’s the fastest in the world. Peak performances are declared at 200 petaflops, which are eight times those of the previous ORNL supercomputer, called Titan, activated in October 2012 and for a few months the most powerful in its category. It’s a system designed for scientific applications with an eye to artificial intelligence.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) presented a prototype of “The Machine”, the computer of the future announced in June 2014. It is a single-memory computer, which means it exceeds the division between RAM and mass memory with its 160 TB (TeraByte) memory, more than that of servers. However, this is not a memtor, the technology being developed that should best combine the benefits of RAM and mass memory.
Google announced its own platform for the Internet of Things, called Android Things. In fact, it’s Brillo project, introduced in May 2015, in which the company included several new features requested by the developers who had the opportunity to test it. The presence of the Weave communication protocol is confirmed.
At the Watson Developer Conference held in San Francisco, IBM announced Project Intu, a new platform designed to make its Watson cognitive computing system accessible from any device. Launched for now in an experimental version, it gives developers who have a Bluemix account to have access to Watson Intu Gateway and create applications using Watson using the SDKs provided as free software through Watson Developer Cloud, Intu Gateway and GitHub.
After three years, the world of supercomputers has a new king: the Top500 ranking crowned Sundai TaihuLight, Chinese as its predecessor Tianhe-2 and the first to use national processors while the previous Chinese supercomputers were still using American processors, especially Intel ones. The computing power of Sundai TaihuLight is 93 PFlop/s, nearly three times that of Tianhe-2.
