US Department unveils Summit supercomputer that peaks at 200 petaflops

The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has unveiled the Summit supercomputer, developed with IBM and Nvidia, among others. With up to 200 petaflops, the US expects to take the top spot in the upcoming Top500 list.

The research institute writes that the system will be opened up for selected projects from the so-called Incite program. The system is intended for applications within artificial intelligence and deep learning. According to Nvidia, the system takes up an area of ​​about two tennis courts and is equipped with 27,648 GPUs.

Nvidia is referring to its Tesla V100 accelerators, which use the Volta architecture. The total system consists of 4608 nodes, with each node having six V100 accelerators coupled with two IBM Power9 CPUs with 22 cores at 3.1GHz. The GPUs and the CPUs are interconnected via Nvidia’s NVLink.

The total memory of the system is about 10 petabytes. Cooling the system requires more than 15,000 liters of water per minute at a peak of about 15MW, according to Cnet. It is planned that the Summit computer will take first place in the upcoming edition of the Top500 list, which will be updated twice a year. The top spot is currently taken by China’s Sunway TaihuLight with peak performance of about 125 petaflops.

In 2014, the US announced that it would invest $425 million in the development of two supercomputers. One is the Summit, while the other system is called Sierra. The most powerful American supercomputer is currently the Titan, which occupies fifth place in the ranking. It was knocked off its top spot in 2013 by a Chinese system.