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Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, capable of 200
petaFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...
thus making it the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world after Frontier (OLCF-5), Fugaku, and
LUMI Lumi may refer to: Computing * Lumi (software), chemical analysis software * Lumi masking, a technique used by video compression software * LUMI, a supercomputer located in Finland Music * ''Lumi'' (album), a 1987 album by Edward Vesala * ...
. It held the number 1 position from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current
LINPACK benchmark The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' by ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which is a common ...
is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS. As of November 2019, the supercomputer had ranked as the 5th most energy efficient in the world with a measured power efficiency of 14.668 gigaFLOPS/watt. Summit was 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.


History

The United States Department of Energy awarded a $325 million contract in November 2014 to IBM,
NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
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. Summit is estimated to cover 873 square meters and require 219 kilometers of cabling. Researchers will utilize Summit for diverse fields such as
cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...
, medicine and climatology. In 2015, the project called Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) included a third supercomputer named
Aurora An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), also commonly known as the polar lights, is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of bri ...
and was planned for installation at
Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research national laboratory operated by UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facility is located in Lemont, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and is the larg ...
. By 2018, Aurora was re-engineered with completion anticipated in 2021 as an
exascale computing Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance. Exascale ...
project along with Frontier and El Capitan to be completed shortly thereafter; Aurora is now planned for completion in late 2022.


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. It has been used in Earthquake Simulation, Extreme Weather simulation using AI, Material science, Genomics and in predicting the lifetime of Neutrinos in physics.


Design

Each one of its 4,608 nodes (with 2 IBM POWER9 CPUs and 6 Nvidia Tesla GPUs in each node) has over 600 GB of coherent memory (96 GB HBM2 plus 512 GB
DDR4 SDRAM Double Data Rate 4 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR4 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous dynamic random-access memory with a high Bandwidth (computing), bandwidth ("double data rate") interface. Released to the market in 2014, it is a v ...
) 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. The POWER9 CPUs and Nvidia Volta GPUs are connected using NVIDIA's high speed
NVLink NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central hub. The protocol was f ...
. This allows for a heterogeneous computing model. 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 200Gbit/s bandwidth between nodes and in-network computing acceleration for communications frameworks such as
MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...
and SHMEM/ PGAS.


See also

*
Titan (supercomputer) Titan or OLCF-3 was a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan was an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in a ...
– OLCF-3 *
Frontier (supercomputer) Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5, is the world's first exascale supercomputer, hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States and first operational in 2022. It is based on the Cray EX and ...
- OLCF-5 * TOP500 *
OpenBMC The OpenBMC project is a Linux Foundation collaborative open-source project whose goal is to produce an open source implementation of the Baseboard Management Controllers (BMC) Firmware Stack. OpenBMC is a Linux distribution for BMCs meant to wor ...
*
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop vers ...


References


External links


A time-lapse video of Summit construction
{{S-end GPGPU supercomputers IBM supercomputers Oak Ridge National Laboratory Petascale computers 64-bit computers