US Oak Ridge National Lab unveils world's most powerful supercomputer

200-petaflop Summit supercomputer eight times more powerful than Titan, the supercomputer it supercedes at Oak Ridge

The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has unveiled Summit, a supercomputer that it claims is the world's most powerful, displacing China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer from top spot.

Summit is rated at 200 petaflops, offering a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second. The US Department of Energy claims that Summit is eight times more powerful than Oak Ridge's next most powerful supercomputer, Titan, which was rated the world's fifth most powerful supercomputer in the last Top500 list back in November 2017.

The next Top500 league table of the world's most powerful supercomputers is due out later this month.

For certain scientific applications, Oak Ridge claims, Summit will be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 ‘exaops'.

Summit's AI-optimised hardware also gives researchers an incredible platform for analysing massive datasets and creating intelligent software

Titan was manufactured by supercomputer specialist Cray and features a total core count of 560,640, based on AMD Opteron 6274 microprocessors running at 2.2GHz, together with Nvidia K20x GPUs. It runs the Cray Linux operating system and consumes 8,209 kilowatts.

Summit, meanwhile, is based on the IBM AC922, consisting of 4,608 compute servers, each containing 22-core IBM Power9 CPUs and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs, interconnected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand. The machine also totes 10 petabytes of memory.

The device, claims the Laboratory, marks an evolution in the hybrid CPU-GPU architecture pioneered by Titan when it was installed in 2012.

"Today's launch of the Summit supercomputer demonstrates the strength of American leadership in scientific innovation and technology development. It's going to have a profound impact in energy research, scientific discovery, economic competitiveness and national security," said US secretary of energy Rick Perry.

He continued: "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."

One of the first applications run on Summit has been a 1.88 exaops comparative genomics calculation for research in bioenergy and human health, producing identical results to the same application run on Titan, only much faster.

The Laboratory also claims that the supercomputer "offers unparalleled opportunities for the integration of AI and scientific discovery, enabling researchers to apply techniques like machine learning and deep learning to problems in human health, high-energy physics, materials discovery and other areas", and will be deployed in the White House Artificial Intelligence for American initiative.

"Summit's AI-optimised hardware also gives researchers an incredible platform for analysing massive datasets and creating intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery," said said Jeff Nichols, Oak Ridge National Laboratory associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences.

It will also be put to work on applications examining supernovas, simulating supernova scenarios; next-generation materials, including compounds for energy storage; analysing unstructured data in cancer research; and, applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to genetic and biomedical datasets.