US takes the lead again for world's fastest supercomputer
IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled the Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer. IBM claims that Summit is currently the world's "most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer" with 200,000 trillion calculations per second. That performance should puts it at the top of the Top 500 supercomputer ranking when the new list is published later this month. It also marks the first time since 2012 that a U.S.-based supercomputer holds the top spot on that list. Summit is eight times more powerful than America's former fastest supercomputer, the Titan, and gives it a substantial edge over China's 93-petaflop TaihuLight, which had been the world's fastest supercomputer since 2016.
Summit has been in development for a few years now and features 4,608 compute servers with two 22-core IBM Power9 chips and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs each. The system also has over 10 petabytes of memory. With inclusion of the Nvidia GPUs, it's no surprise that the system is meant to be used for machine learning and deep learning applications, as well as the usual high performance computing workloads for research in energy and advanced materials that you would expect to happen at Oak Ridge.
IBM was the general contractor for Summit and the company collaborated with Nvidia, RedHat and InfiniBand networking specialists Mellanox on delivering the new machine. According to Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director, Summit's AI-optimized hardware gives researchers an incredible platform for analyzing massive datasets and creating intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery. Summit is one of two of these next-generation supercomputers that IBM is building for the DEO. The second one is Sierra, which will be housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sierra, which is also scheduled to go online this year, is less powerful at an expected 125 petaflops, but both systems are significantly more powerful than any other machine in the DoE's arsenal right now.
Advances in computing power have been compared to the Space Race between America and the U.S.S.R., though the primary contenders this time around are the U.S. and China. The debut of Summit is a step towards what might be called that competition's moon landing - an exascale computer, capable of a billion billion calculations per second. The U.S. has set a goal of developing an exascale computer by 2021, but according to DoE, Summit can already reach exascale speeds for certain scientific applications. Like the space race, the development of incredibly powerful computers will spread innovation across many sectors, and could confer long-term competitive advantages to the nation in the lead. The most dramatic competition may be in the development of artificial intelligence, but much attention is also focused on Summit's application in health sciences. The ability to search and collate vast amounts of data is expected to speed the discovery of new medicines and advanced treatments, such as by correlating diseases to genetic markers, or developing individually customized treatments for each patient.