AI needs supercomputing. Check out the 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world

The current artificial intelligence boom would not be possible without the fastest computers in the world — supercomputers.

Supercomputing, a type of high-performance computing, involves extremely fast computers that use multiple central processing units, or CPUs, grouped into compute nodes. These nodes are made up of a processor or group of processors and memory, and can communicate to solve problems. Supercomputers can consist of tens of thousands of nodes, which also interconnect with I/O systems such as data storage and networking.

Supercomputers have been used to discover new materials to develop batteries and chips, in disease research, and to run AI workloads.

Compared to even the fastest laptop, supercomputers can have one million times more processing power, according to IBM (IBM). Supercomputing uses floating-point operations per second, or FLOPS, as a measurement, and petaflops are a unit of a computer’s speed equal to a thousand trillion flops, or 10 to the 15th power.

The U.S. is home to five of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to the 64th edition of the TOP500. The top three supercomputers, all based in the U.S., are classified by TOP500 as exascale systems — a computer that can perform at least one exaflop, or one quintillion operations per second (or 1,000 times a petaflop).

Here are the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world measured in petaflops, according to TOP500.