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IBM’S SUMMIT SUPERCOMUTER TAKES THE LEAD IN SPEED
The IBM Summit supercomputer has claimed the title of being the world’s fastest machine. Built for the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, the Summit supercomputer has been clocked at 122 petaflops (one petaflop equals one quadrillion floating point operations per second) and has a theoretical peak processing power of 200 petaflops. In comparison, your new laptop might be able to pull o something in the realm of one teraflop (one trillion floating point operations per second). For certain applications, the Summit will be capable of more than three billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops, and it’s hoped that the machine will pave the way for the first exascale computing ecosystem for broad scientific use by 2021. Summit usurps China’s Sunway TaihuLight as the fastest computer in the world. The Sunway TaihuLight, which
WORLD BEATER The Summit supercomputer from IBM has reached the peak of performance, achieving 122 petaflops per second (photos courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy)
has a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops, and a peak processing power of 125 petaflops. Summit runs a Linux OS consisting of 4608 compute servers, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators, interconnected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand. The supercomputer has more than 10 petabytes of memory, paired with fast, high-bandwidth pathways for e icient data movement. Among the first projects to take advantage of the supercomputer’s brawn will be experiments in astrophysics, understanding of materials at the subatomic level, using machine learning to get data about cancer prevalence, and genetics research.
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