You’d need 63 billion years to do what this computer can do in a second

Not so fast, China. America just won back bragging rights in the global supercomputer race.

For the past five years, China has had the world’s fastest computer, a striking symbolic achievement that highlighted the nation’s ambitions and progress in high tech.

But the United States has regained the lead thanks to a new supercomputer built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee by IBM in a partnership with Nvidia. The speedy performance of the machine, called Summit, was announced on Friday.

“We’re seeing the U.S. back on top again,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, who tracks supercomputer speeds and rankings.