US unveils world’s most powerful supercomputer

WASHINGTON: US scientists have unveiled the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer that can complete over 2,00,000 trillion calculations per second — providing unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI).

HIGHLIGHTS

• The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supercomputer called Summit will be eight times more powerful than its previous top-ranked system, Titan.
• Summit will also be capable of more than 3 billion billion mixed precision calculations a second.

The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supercomputer called Summit will be eight times more powerful than its previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than 3 billion billion mixed precision calculations a second.

The IBM AC922 system consists of 4,608 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 100 Gb/s InfiniBand.

Summit also possesses over 10 petabytes of memory paired with fast, high-bandwidth pathways for data movement. The combination of cutting-edge hardware and robust data subsystems marks an evolution of the hybrid CPU-GPU architecture successfully pioneered by Titan in 2012.