INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) today unveiled Summit, the department newest supercomputer
IBM claims that Summit is currently the world &most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer& with a peak performance of a whopping
200,000 trillion calculations per second
That performance should put it comfortably at the top of the Top 500 supercomputer ranking when the new list is published later this month
That would also mark the first time since 2012 that a U.S.-based supercomputer holds the top spot on that list.
Summit, which has been in
the works for a few years now, features 4,608 compute servers with two 22-core IBM Power9 chips and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs each
In total, the system also features over 10 petabytes of memory
Given the presence of the Nvidia GPUs, it no surprise that the system is meant to be used for machine learning and deep learning
applications, as well as the usual high performance computing workloads for research in energy and advanced materials that you would expect
to happen at Oak Ridge.
IBM was the general contractor for Summit and the company collaborated with Nvidia, RedHat and InfiniBand networking
specialists Mellanox on delivering the new machine.
Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
&Summit AI-optimized hardware also gives
researchers an incredible platform for analyzing massive datasets and creating intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery,&
said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences, in today announcement.
Summit is one of two
of these next-generation supercomputers that IBM is building for the DEO
The second one is Sierra, which will be housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Sierra, which is also scheduled to go online this year, is less powerful at an expected 125 petaflops, but both systems are significantly
more powerful than any other machine in the DoE arsenal right now.
