ORNL Launches 200-Petaflop Supercomputer

The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has announced the debut of the new Summit supercomputer, which they are calling “the world's most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer.”

According to the press release, the Summit is capable of 200,000 trillion calculations per second (200 petaflops). ORNL says it is eight times more powerful than Titan, the previously top-ranked Oak Ridge system. Summit is also capable of performing up to 3 billion mixed-precision calculations per second (3.3exaops).

The Summit system includes 4,608 compute servers, each with two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators. The compute servers are interconnected with Mellanox EDR 100Gbps InfiniBand. The system has more than 10 petabytes of memory.

ORNL researchers put Summit through its paces with what they call the “world's first exascale scientific calculation.” The team used Summit to run a 1.88exaops comparative genomics calculation that they say was “relevant to research in bioenergy and human health.”

According to ORNL, Summit is already slated to participate in projects related to astrophysics, material science, cancer diagnosis, and systems biology.