Laying claim to the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer, Summit is eight times more powerful than ORNL's previous supercomputer, Titan, which came online in 2012 with a capacity of 27 petaflops.

Supercomputers have advanced so far and so fast that it's easy to forget that the computers called smartphones we carry around in our pockets could stroll past a state-of-the-art supercomputer of a generation ago without breaking a digital sweat. However, ORNL's Titan supercomputer was 200,000 times more powerful than a desktop computer, so why make one eight times more powerful than that?