Engineers at the US Department of Energy National Laboratory have announced the creation of the world's most powerful supercomputer, according to the MIT Technology Review.
According to the publication, the performance of the American Summit machine is up to 200 petaflops - 200 million billion operations per second.
"By comparison, everyone on Earth must perform an operation every second for 305 days to cope with what a new machine can do in the blink of an eye," the newspaper writes.
Summit's claimed performance is twice that of China-developed Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer (93 petaflops), which was previously considered the most powerful device in the world.
Scientists intend to use the new supercomputer, including to search for possible connections between genes and cancer, as well as between the emergence of addictions to drugs. The device could also aid in climate modeling, which will increase the effectiveness of weather forecasting, the report said.
As the newspaper notes, all over the world, supercomputers are used both for research and for the development of new weapons.
"If the most powerful in the United States, then the American researchers and the country's armed forces will have an additional advantage," the newspaper writes.