By Josh Perry, Editor
[email protected]

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tenn.), in partnership with Nvidia and IBM, has revealed Summit, the most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer in the world, according to a report from the lab.

ORNL created Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Summit can perform 200,000 trillion calculations per second (200 petaflops), which is eight times better than Titan, which was the previous top performing computer. In some cases, researchers say that Summit will be able to perform more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second (3.3 exaops).

The report explained, “Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.”

Summit is an IBM AC922 system with more than 4,000 compute servers that each contain 22-core OBM Power9 processors and six Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators. It also has more than 10 petabytes of memory.

“Summit takes accelerated computing to the next level, with more computing power, more memory, an enormous high-performance file system and fast data paths to tie it all together. That means researchers will be able to get more accurate results faster,” said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences.

An article about Summit from TechReports.com indicated that cold plate technology is used to keep the supercomputer cool.

It said, “The Power9 and Tesla V100 silicon is cooled using "cold-plate" technology, which judging from the picture means the type of water blocks familiar to builders of PC open-loop liquid cooling systems. The remainder of the heat removed from each rack is removed using a back-of-the-cabinet heat exchanger. The cold plates and the heat exchangers both use medium-temperature water, a setup the Oak Ridge team says is more cost-effective to maintain than traditional cold water setups.”