38810 - Summit, the new supercomputer

N. Lygeros

History at this level started with the supercomputer Phoenix (OLCF-1), continued with Jaguar (OLCF-2) and Titan (OLCF-3). The present is Summit (OLCF-4) and the future will be Frontier (OLCF-5) in 2021. Supercomputers are a measure of a nation’s technological prowess. That’s why it was important for USA to create the world’s supercomputer before China. Summit has a peak performance of 200 petaflops and is capable of more than 3.3 exaops. This is an unprecedented computing power for research. It was also 10 petabytes of memory. The IBM AC922 system consists of 4,608 compute servers, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and 6 NVIDIA Tesla V101 GPU accelerators. This new supercomputer will be used in the fields of Astrophysics, Materials, Cancer Surveillance and Systems Biology. Each node has over 500GB of coherent memory plus 800GB of non-volatile RAM. But for us, what’s most important is that now we have big data and artificial intelligence machines. Because we can use a mix of AI techniques on Summit by this way it will be possible to understand some of the complexity of humans. Summit is no more a traditional supercomputer technology because it uses at a very high level Artificial Intelligence.