This supercomputer created by Bay Area scientists can predict tsunamis

The Brief

  • The computer is faster than one million smartphones, and it does 1.74 quintillion calculations per second.
  • The lab worked with the University of Texas, Austin and UC San Diego on the project.
  • The supercomputer is a finalist for the Gordon Bell Prize, which garners entries from scientists around the world.

LIVERMORE, Calif. A Bay Area laboratory has developed technology that can predict tsunamis in real-time. KTVU got a look at the “world’s fastest supercomputer” on Tuesday, coming off the heels of a tsunami advisory last month prompted by an earthquake in Russia.

Many computers operate on just one graphics processing unit, or GPU.

This supercomputer has more than 40,000 GPUs, according to Tzanio Kolev, a computational mathematician at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

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