Summit (supercomputer)

Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, capable of 200 petaFLOPS, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world from November 2018 to June 2020.[5][6] Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.[7] As of November 2019, the supercomputer is also the 5th most energy efficient in the world with a measured power efficiency of 14.668 gigaFLOPS/watt.[8] Summit is the first supercomputer to reach exaflop (a quintillion operations per second) speed, achieving 1.88 exaflops during a genomic analysis and is expected to reach 3.3 exaflops using mixed precision calculations.[9]

Summit components

Summit

Sponsors	U.S. Department of Energy
Operators	IBM
Architecture	9,216 POWER9 22-core CPUs 27,648 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs[1]
Power	13 MW[2]
Operating system	Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)[3][4]
Storage	250 PB
Speed	200 petaFLOPS (peak)
Purpose	Scientific research
Web site	www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/summit/

History

The United States Department of Energy awarded a $325 million contract in November 2014 to IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox. The effort resulted in construction of Summit and Sierra. Summit is tasked with civilian scientific research and is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Sierra is designed for nuclear weapons simulations and is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.[10] Summit is estimated to cover the space of two basketball courts and require 136 miles of cabling.[11] Researchers will utilize Summit for diverse fields such as cosmology, medicine and climatology.[12]

In 2015, the project called Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) included a third supercomputer named Aurora and was planned for installation at Argonne National Laboratory.[13] By 2018, Aurora was re-engineered with completion anticipated in 2021 as an exascale computing project along with Frontier and El Capitan to be completed shortly thereafter.[14]

Uses

The Summit supercomputer provides scientists and researchers the opportunity to solve complex tasks in the fields of energy, artificial intelligence, human health and other research areas.[15] It has been used in Earthquake Simulation, Extreme Weather simulation using AI, Material science, Genomics and in predicting the lifetime of Neutrinos in physics. [16]

Design

POWER9 wafer with TOP500 certificates for Summit & Sierra

Each one of its 4,608 nodes (2 IBM POWER9 CPUs and 6 Nvidia Tesla GPUs / node[17]) has over 600 GB of coherent memory (6×16 = 96 GB HBM2 plus 2×8×32 = 512 GB DDR4 SDRAM) which is addressable by all CPUs and GPUs plus 800 GB of non-volatile RAM that can be used as a burst buffer or as extended memory.[18] The POWER9 CPUs and Volta GPUs are connected using Nvidia's high speed NVLink. This allows for a heterogeneous computing model.[19] To provide a high rate of data throughput, the nodes will be connected in a non-blocking fat-tree topology using a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect for both storage and inter-process communications traffic which delivers both 200Gb/s bandwidth between nodes and in-network computing acceleration for communications frameworks such as MPI and SHMEM/PGAS.

See also

• Titan (supercomputer) – OLCF-3
• Sierra (supercomputer) – a similar POWER9 NVLink system
• Frontier (supercomputer) – OLCF-5
• TOP500
• OpenBMC
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux

References

1. "ORNL Launches Summit Supercomputer".
2. Liu, Zhiye (26 June 2018). "US Dethrones China With IBM Summit Supercomputer". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 19 July 2018.
3. Kerner, Sean Michael (8 June 2018). "IBM Unveils Summit, the World's Fastest Supercomputer (For Now)". Server Watch. Retrieved 24 February 2020.
4. Nestor, Marius (11 June 2018). "Meet IBM Summit, World's Fastest and Smartest Supercomputer Powered by Linux". Softpedia News. Retrieved 24 February 2020.
5. Lohr, Steve (8 June 2018). "Move Over, China: U.S. Is Again Home to World's Speediest Supercomputer". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 July 2018.
6. "Top 500 List - June 2020". TOP500. June 2020. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
7. "June 2019 | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites". TOP500. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
8. "Green500 List - November 2019". TOP500. Retrieved 7 April 2020.
9. Holt, Kris. "The US again has the world's most powerful supercomputer". Engadget. Retrieved 20 July 2018.
10. Shankland, Steven (14 September 2015). "IBM, Nvidia land $325M supercomputer deal". C|Net. Retrieved 29 December 2015.
11. Alcorn, Paul (20 November 2017). "Regaining America's Supercomputing Supremacy With The Summit Supercomputer". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 20 November 2017.
12. Noyes, Katherine (16 March 2015). "IBM, Nvidia rev HPC engines in next-gen supercomputer push". PC World. Retrieved 29 December 2015.
13. R. Johnson, Colin (15 April 2015). "IBM vs. Intel in Supercomputer Bout". EE Times. Retrieved 29 December 2015.
14. Morgan, Timothy Prickett (9 April 2018). "Bidders Off And Running After $1.8 Billion DOE Exascale Super Deals". The Next Platform. Retrieved 20 July 2018.
15. "Introducing Summit". Retrieved 24 December 2019.
16. "Summit Supercomputer is Already Making its Mark on Science". Retrieved 5 August 2020.
17. "The most powerful computers on the planet - Summit and Sierra". IBM. IBM. 6 June 2018. Retrieved 4 April 2019.
18. Lilly, Paul (January 25, 2017). "NVIDIA 12nm FinFET Volta GPU Architecture Reportedly Replacing Pascal In 2017". HotHardware.
19. "Summit and Sierra Supercomputers: An Inside Look at the U.S. Department of Energy's New Pre-Exascale Systems" (PDF). November 1, 2014.

External links

• A time-lapse video of Summit construction

Records
Preceded by Sunway TaihuLight 93.01 petaFLOPS	World's most powerful supercomputer 148.6 petaFLOPS June 2018 - June 2020	Succeeded by RIKEN Fugaku 0.54 exaFLOPS