Summit, the world’s most powerful computer

Superordinateur Summit, Laboratoire national d’Oak Ridge. (CC BY 2.0) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

The United States is back in supercomputer pole position since last week’s announcement, by the US Department of Energy and IBM, of the Summit, the world’s newest most powerful computer, lapping China’s Sunway TaihuLight. With a peak performance of 200 petaflops, the IBM AC922 uses 4,608 compute servers, each containing two 22 core IBM Power9 processors and six Nvidia Tesla V100 units. The servers are connected by 300 km of fibre optics, are water-cooled and can store 250 petabytes of data. Taking up 520m2 (5,600ft2) of floor space and weighing over 340 tonnes, Summit is a massive system optimized for AI applications. Even so, it is relatively energy smart, requiring just 13 megawatts of power, compared to TaihuLight’s 15 megawatts.

⇨ Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “Summit.”

⇨ Circuit Breaker, “The world’s fastest supercomputer is back in America.”