Has a peak performance of 200 petaflops calculations/second

Jun 11, 2018 21:47 GMT  ·  By

ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and the U.S. Department of Energy unveiled Summit, world’s most powerful, fastest, and smartest scientific supercomputer powered by Linux.

That's right, America once again has the most powerful supercomputer in the world, for now, which is eight times more powerful than the Titan supercomputer. Capable of peak performances of 200 petaflops or 200,000 trillion calculations per second, the Summit supercomputer owned by the U.S. Department of Energy is used for scientific purposes.

"I am truly excited by the potential of Summit, as it moves the nation one step closer to the goal of delivering an exascale supercomputing system by 2021. Summit will empower scientists to address a wide range of new challenges, accelerate discovery, spur innovation and above all, benefit the American people," said Rick Perry, Secretary of Energy.

Summit is, in fact, an IBM AC922 supercomputer that features a total of 4,608 compute servers containing no less than six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs and two 22-core IBM Power9 processors. Summit's 4,608 compute servers are interconnected using dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and uses 10 petabytes of RAM (system memory) that's paired with high-bandwidth, efficient, and fast pathways.

Designed for astrophysics, cancer surveillance, and systems biology

Designed for scientific purposes, Summit can be used for a wide-range of applications and offers unparalleled opportunities to America's top scientists in their conquest to understand human health and disease outcomes. Among some of the areas where Summit will be extremely useful, we can mention cancer surveillance, systems biology, astrophysics, and materials discovery.

"Summit takes accelerated computing to the next level, with more computing power, more memory, an enormous high-performance file system and fast data paths to tie it all together. That means researchers will be able to get more accurate results faster," said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences.

Summit will also enable the U.S. Department of Energy and ORNL to respond to the White House Artificial Intelligence for America initiative. Of course, all this power must be managed by a versatile operating system, and it looks like ORNL choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its Summit supercomputer, which will be open to select projects this year. To learn more about Summit, please visit the official announcement page.

IBM Summit supercomputer
IBM Summit supercomputer
IBM Summit supercomputer
IBM Summit supercomputer

IBM Summit (3 Images)

IBM Summit supercomputer
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