The Summit Supercomputer
- (Summit Supercomputer - Oak Ridge National Lab, U.S.A.)
- Overview
Summit, also known as OLCF-4, is a supercomputer developed by IBM for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). It was launched in 2018 and is considered one of the most powerful computational tools for solving energy problems.
Summit's architecture connects over 27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs with more than 9,000 IBM Power9 CPUs. It has a hybrid architecture, with each node containing multiple IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs connected by NVIDIA's NVLink.
Summit's local memory, including high-bandwidth memory on each GPU, provides AI researchers with a starting point for data-intensive tasks.
- The Summit Supercomputer for the AI Era
Summit Supercomputer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) - The world’s most powerful supercomputer, as of June, 2018, is tailor made for the AI era.
The machine is capable, at peak performance, of 200 petaflops - 200 million billion calculations a second. To put that in context, everyone on earth would have to do a calculation every second of every day for 305 days to crunch what the new machine can do in the blink of an eye. Summit is 60 percent faster than the Chinese SunWay TaihuLight (神威·太湖之光) (with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops, as of March 2018) and almost eight times as fast as a machine called Titan, which is also housed at ORNL and held the US supercomputing speed record until Summit’s arrival.
With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.
Summit is also an important stepping stone to the next big prize in computing: machines capable of an exaflop, or a billion billion calculations a second. The experience of building Summit, which fills an area the size of two tennis courts and carries 4,000 gallons of water a minute through its cooling system to carry away about 13 megawatts of heat, will help inform work on exascale machines, which will require even more impressive infrastructure. Things like Summit’s advanced memory management and the novel, high-bandwidth linkages that connect its chips will be essential for handling the vast amounts of data exascale machines will generate.
- The Applications of Summit Supercomputer
Common applications for supercomputers include testing mathematical models for complex physical phenomena or designs, such as climate and weather, evolution of the cosmos, nuclear weapons and reactors, new chemical compounds (especially for pharmaceutical purposes), and cryptology. As the cost of supercomputing declined in the 1990s, more businesses began to use supercomputers for market research and other business-related models.
Summit is the first supercomputer designed from the ground up to run AI applications, such as machine learning and neural networks. It has over 27,000 GPU chips from Nvidia, whose products have supercharged plenty of AI applications, and also includes some of IBM’s Power9 chips, which the company launched last year specifically for AI workloads. There’s also an ultrafast communications link for shipping data between these silicon workhorses.
All this allows Summit to run some applications up to 10 times faster than Titan while using only 50 percent more electrical power. Among the AI-related projects slated to run on the new supercomputer is one that will crunch through huge volumes of written reports and medical images to try to identify possible relationships between genes and cancer. Another will try to identify genetic traits that could predispose people to opioid addiction and other afflictions.
[More to come ...]
