A more immediate concern is that the Volta GPU is going to be the computational heart of Summit and Sierra, two of the upcoming pre-exascale supercomputers that the US Department of Energy is deploying under the agency’s CORAL (Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore) program. As far as we know, both systems are on track to be installed before the end of 2017 and go into production in early 2018. Although the host GPU of these two systems is the Power9 CPU, about 90 percent of their floating point performance is likely to be provided by the Volta coprocessors. Therefore, the performance of Summit and Sierra will be primarily derived from the capabilities of the Volta silicon.
The Summit supercomputer, in particular, will receive a great deal of scrutiny, since it is expected to deliver somewhere between 150 and 300 peak petaflops of performance when deployed at Oak Ridge National Lab toward the end of the year. That could be enough for the US to recapture the number one spot on the TOP500 list for the first time since 2012, assuming it gets installed in time for a Linpack run before November 2017. That also assumes that China doesn’t come up with a system even bigger than Summit in the interim. As we reported last week, the Tianhe-2A system is now overdue for its deployment, and is likely
to be installed in 2017 with a peak capacity well north of 100 petaflops.
Much more of the Volta story should unfold in early May, during NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), where the new architecture is expected to be introduced. We might even get a peak of what comes after Volta at GTC. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
