The Department of Energy’s 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer is now in operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The new system is being touted as “the most powerful and smartest machine in the world.”
And unless the Chinese pull off some sort of surprise this month, the new system will vault the US back into first place on the TOP500 list when the new rankings are announced in a couple of weeks. Although the DOE has not revealed Summit’s Linpack result as of yet, the system’s 200-plus-petaflop peak number will surely be enough to outrun the 93-petaflop Linpack mark of the current TOP500 champ, China’s Sunway TaihuLight.
Assuming all those nodes are fully equipped, the GPUs alone will provide 215 peak petaflops at double precision. Also, since each V100 also delivers 125 teraflops of mixed precision, Tensor Core operations, the system’s peak rating for deep learning performance is something on the order of 3.3 exaflops.
Those exaflops are not just theoretical either. According to ORNL director Thomas Zacharia, even before the machine was fully built, researchers had run a comparative genomics code at 1.88 exaflops using the Tensor Core capability of the GPUs. The application was rummaging through genomes looking for patterns indicative of certain conditions. “This is the first time anyone has broken the exascale barrier,” noted Zacharia.
...
The analytics aspect dovetails nicely with Summit’s deep learning propensities, inasmuch as the former is really just a superset of the latter. When the DOE first contracted for the system back in 2014, the agency probably only had a rough idea of what they would be getting AI-wise. Although IBM had been touting its data-centric approach to supercomputing prior to pitching its Power9-GPU platform to the DOE, the AI/machine learning application space was in its early stages. Because NVIDIA made the decision to integrate the specialized Tensor Cores into the V100, Summit ended up being an AI behemoth, as well as a powerhouse HPC machine.
As a result, the system is likely to be engaged in a lot of cutting-edge AI research, in addition to its HPC duties. For the time being, Summit will only be open to select projects as it goes through its acceptance process. In 2019, the system will become more widely available, including its use in the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.
