For the past five years, China's Sunway TaihuaLight has been the supreme leader in the supercomputer. But things have changed with the arrival of Summit – a new supercomputer unveiled by the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
With a peak capacity of 200 petaflops (or 200,000 trillion calculations per second), it is about eight times faster than Titan, another powerful supercomputer developed by ORNL. It is also faster than Sunway, which can run at 125 petaflops at its peak capacity, making Summit about 60% faster. It also runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
In terms of size, Summit covers an area equal to two tennis courts! Its 4,608 servers house about 9,000 22-core IBM Power9 processors and 27,0000 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs. The electricity required to run the supercomputer is enough to power 8,000 homes, and it takes about 15,000 liters of water per minute to keep the supercomputer cool while it performs calculations.
Where can all this power be applied?
Summit will be used in artificial intelligence and machine learning projects to help scientists make discoveries that were not possible before.
ORNL researchers have already performed the world's first exascale scientific computation (which is a billion billion calculations per second) using Summit, which ran at 1.88 exaops.
The projects created for Summit belong to various fields, such as finding supernovae, how metals such as iron end up in our bodies, developing new materials, analyzing medical data to find treatments for Cancer, etc.
