IBM, NVIDIA Help U.S. Leapfrog China in Supercomputer Race

The U.S. has a new supercomputer and it’s twice as fast as the current record holder in China.

International Business Machines Corp. developed the Summit computer, with help from NVIDIA Corp., for the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system cost about $200 million to build, will occupy a warehouse the size of two tennis courts and be put to work on super-complex calculations that could lead to breakthroughs in fields from astrophysics to cancer research, the lab said in a statement June 8.

Summit also brings the title of world’s fastest computer back to the U.S. It comes ...