Oak Ridge has a New Gigantic Supercomputer in the Works

The US Department of Energy has announced that IBM will provide a next-generation supercomputer for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The new “Summit” supercomputer, which will go online in 2017, will “… provide at least five times the performance of Titan, the OLCF’s current leadership system, for a wide range of scientific applications.” ORNL’s Titan system is listed as the second fastest supercomputer in the world on the latest edition of the TOP500 list.
Summit will include 3,400 nodes, each with multiple IBM Power9 processors and multiple Nvidia Volta GPUs. Every node will also offer more than 512GB of combined DDR4 and high-bandwidth memory and an additional 800GB of NVRAM to serve as either a burst buffer or as extended memory.
According to Summit project director Buddy Bland, “Summit builds on the hybrid multi-core architecture that the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) successfully pioneered with Titan. The large, powerful nodes allow applications to achieve very high performance without have to scale to hundreds or thousands of Message Passing Interface (MPI) tasks.”
ORNL says it will use the Summit system to study combustion science, climate change, energy storage, and nuclear power.