Oak Ridge Today

Summit at ORNL remains No. 2 in world

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The Summit supercomputer, a 200-petaflop IBM system that is the world’s second most powerful, is pictured above at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Katie Bethea/ORNL)

The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remains the fastest supercomputer in the United States and the second most powerful in the world.

Summit, an IBM system, was the world’s most powerful supercomputer from June 2018 to November 2019, when the U.S. Department of Energy had the two fastest systems in the world.

DOE still has two of the three fastest supercomputers, Summit at ORNL and Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. And it has three of the top five systems in the world. DOE has a new supercomputer, Perlmutter, ranked at number five. It’s at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, California. Perlmutter was the only new system in the top 10 in the semiannual TOP500 list released Monday.

Summit was bumped from the top spot on the TOP500 list by a Japanese supercomputer, Fugaku, in June 2020.

Fugaku, which is in Kobe, Japan, remained in the top spot on the TOP500 list released in November and again on the list released Monday. The TOP500 list uses a benchmark test to rank the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

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DOE: New $600 million supercomputer at ORNL will be world’s most powerful

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Pictured above from left during an announcement for the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Tuesday, May 7, 2019, are Energy Secretary Rick Perry; ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia; Peter Ungaro, Cray president and chief executive officer; and Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

Note: This story was last updated at 3 p.m. May 21.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday announced a contract with Cray Inc. to build the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is expected to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer when it debuts in 2021.

The contract with Cray is valued at more than $600 million for the system and technology development, a press release said.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry was at ORNL on Tuesday morning to make the announcement.

“This is a big deal,” Perry said. “Frontier’s record-breaking performance will ensure our country’s ability to lead the world in science that improves the lives and economic prosperity of all Americans and the entire world. Frontier will accelerate innovation in AI (artificial intelligence) by giving American researchers world-class data and computing resources to ensure the next great inventions are made in the United States.”

Besides the supercomputing announcement on Tuesday, Perry also delivered the keynote speech at InnovationXLab: Advanced Manufacturing Summit at ORNL.

Frontier is expected to perform at greater than 1.5 exaflops. It will be able to solve calculations up to 50 times faster than today’s top supercomputers, exceeding a quintillion, or 1018, calculations per second, the press release said. That’s a billion billion calculations per second.

Oak Ridge Today has previously reported that Frontier would be built at ORNL. But the contract with Cray and its value and the specific performance estimate of more than 1.5 exaflops are all new announcements. The contract award includes technology development funding, a center of excellence, several early-delivery systems, the main Frontier system, and multi-year systems support. The Frontier system is expected to be delivered in 2021, and acceptance is expected in 2022. 

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Supercomputers: Summit at ORNL still number one

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer was named number one on the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems on Monday, June 25, 2018. (Photo credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer was again named number one on the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems on Monday, Nov. 12, 2018. (Photo credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

 

The 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory stayed at number one on the semiannual TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers released Monday.

The Sierra supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, climbed to number two from number three. That means the United States now has the top two systems in the world, a position that China held a year ago.

Summit, a water-cooled IBM-built supercomputer, debuted at number one on the TOP500 list in June. That was the first time since 2012 that the United States had the most powerful supercomputer in the world. The earlier top system, Titan, a Cray machine, is also located at ONRL. ORNL and LLNL are both U.S. Department of Energy laboratories.

Officials celebrated the launch of Summit in a ceremony attended by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry on June 8. The supercomputer is capable of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. That makes it about about eight times more powerful than Titan, its predecessor.

Besides being the most powerful, Summit has been described as the world’s smartest supercomputer, a machine that can learn. As big as two tennis courts, Summit has 4,608 compute servers. Each has two 22-core IBM Power9 central processing units (CPUs) and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators. That’s more than 9,000 conventional processors and nearly 28,000 graphics processors, or about 37,000 total. [Read more…]

For first time since 2012, US has top supercomputer in world

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer was named number one on the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems on Monday, June 25, 2018. (Photo credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer was named number one on the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems on Monday, June 25, 2018. (Photo credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

 

For the first time since 2012, the United States has the most powerful supercomputer in the world, and it’s again located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The new supercomputer, called Summit, is capable of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. Equipment delivery for Summit was completed in March, and officials celebrated the launch of the supercomputer in a ceremony attended by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry on June 8.

The last time the United States had the top supercomputer was in November 2012. That machine, which is still in use, is named Titan, and it’s also at ORNL. It’s now number seven on the semiannual TOP500 list, which was released Monday.

China had held the top spot since June 2013, and the country had held the top two spots since June 2016. That ended with Monday’s TOP500 announcement. Previously at number one and number two, the top two Chinese supercomputers have fallen to number two and number four.

ORNL, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, now has two of the top seven systems on the list. They are Summit at number one and Titan at number seven. The United States now has six of the top 10 machines, according to the TOP500 list. [Read more…]

ORNL again has world’s most powerful supercomputer

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Pictured above being interviewed by a CNBC television crew before a ceremony on Friday afternoon, June 8, 2018, for the new Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are Ginni Rometty, left, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of IBM; Rick Perry, second from right, U.S. Department of Energy secretary; and Jensen Huang, right, founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

Pictured above being interviewed by a CNBC television crew before a ceremony on Friday afternoon, June 8, 2018, for the new Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are Ginni Rometty, left, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of IBM; Rick Perry, second from right, U.S. Department of Energy secretary; and Jensen Huang, right, founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

Note: This story was last updated at 6 p.m. June 9.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory again has the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It’s also the world’s smartest supercomputer, a machine that can learn—and run software that will write software.

The supercomputer, called Summit, is capable of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. During a Friday afternoon ceremony, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Summit can save 30 years worth of desktop data in one hour. It is millions times faster than a really good high-end desktop, said Ginni Rometty, IBM chair, president, and chief executive officer.

A water-cooled IBM system, Summit is presumed to have bumped China from the top spot, at least among open-science systems or supercomputers that aren’t classified. It has successfully run the world’s first exascale scientific calculation.

“We know we’re in competition, and it matters who gets there first,” Perry told several hundred people at the Friday afternoon ceremony at ORNL, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory. “We reached a pinnacle today.”

Researchers at ORNL could find the cure for Alzheimer’s disease or cancer, Perry said. Winning the global supercomputing race could have benefits for all of humanity, said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder, president, and CEO. [Read more…]

DOE announces $1.8 billion program for new supercomputers, with one at ORNL

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Rick Perry

Rick Perry

Note: This story was last updated at 12 p.m.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced a new supercomputing program on Monday that could be worth up to $1.8 billion and deploy two systems, with one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, that would be 50 to 100 times more powerful than today’s computers.

The new systems are called exascale computers. DOE said the new supercomputers will solidify United States leadership in exascale computing.

The initiative was announced by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Perry announced a request for proposals, or RFP, for the development of at least two new exascale supercomputers to be deployed at DOE national laboratories sometime around 2021-2023.

“The new supercomputers funded through this RFP will be follow-on systems to the first U.S. exascale system authorized by Secretary Perry this past June, named Aurora, which is currently under development at Argonne National Laboratory and scheduled to come online in 2021,” a press release said. The RFP announced Monday envisions the possibility of upgrades to Aurora or even a follow-on system in 2022-2023, “depending on an assessment of needs and opportunities at that time.” [Read more…]

ORNL’s Dean named associate laboratory director for physical sciences

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David J. Dean

David J. Dean

 

David J. Dean has been named associate laboratory director for physical sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, effective May 1.

The Physical Sciences Directorate encompasses the laboratory’s materials science and technology, chemical sciences, nanoscience, physics, and isotope production research programs and activities, a press release said.

“In his new position, David will pursue excellence across our broad physical sciences portfolio, with particular emphases on quantum materials, structural materials and alloys, soft materials, nanoscience, and applications of materials and chemistry in energy and security,” said ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia. [Read more…]

Fleischmann: Supercomputing race could change with Summit at ORNL

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The installation of the Summit supercomputer continues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Jan. 23, 2018, with the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and IBM teams receiving and installing compute nodes. Summit will come online in late 2018 for early science, and will be available to users in January 2019. (Image credit: Jason Richards/ORNL. Used under Creative Commons license)

The installation of the Summit supercomputer continues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Jan. 23, 2018, with the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and IBM teams receiving and installing compute nodes. Summit will come online in late 2018 for early science, and will be available to users in January 2019. (Image credit: Jason Richards/ORNL. Used under Creative Commons license)

 

The supercomputer being built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory could change the race for supercomputing supremacy between the United States and China, U.S. Representative Chuck Fleischmann said during a budget hearing on Thursday.

The congressman said Summit, a 200-petaflop supercomputer at ORNL, will be commissioned this summer, and it will be the fastest supercomputer in the world, with twice the power of the top Chinese system. The Chinese machine is a 93-petaflop system known as Sunway TaihuLight.

During Thursday’s budget hearing, which featured Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Fleischmann said the United States and China are in a race for supercomputing supremacy. The race is critical to advances in science and technology that will drive economic growth, said Fleischmann, a Republican whose district includes Oak Ridge.

Citing a February 9 edition of Science magazine, Fleischmann said the U.S. dominated supercomputer rankings for decades but is now far behind. The combined power of the top two machines in China easily outpaces all 21 supercomputers operated by the U.S. Department of Energy, the country’s top funder of supercomputers, the congressman said.

But that could change with the commissioning of Summit this summer, Fleischmann said. [Read more…]

ORNL receives DOE funding for applications for more powerful supercomputers

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory Sign

Photo by ORNL

 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has received funding from a federal project to develop applications for more powerful supercomputers, systems that could be 50 to 100 times more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers.

The project is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, or ECP. It’s to develop applications for future exascale systems. Exascale refers to high-performance computing systems capable of at least a billion billion calculations per second, which is up to 100 times faster than the nation’s most powerful supercomputers in use today, a press release said.

The work on applications will help guide DOE’s development of a U.S. exascale ecosystem as part of President Barack Obama’s National Strategic Computing Initiative, or NSCI, the press release said.

The first round of ECP funding totals $39.8 million for 22 proposals representing teams from 45 research and academic organizations. ORNL researchers and technical staff will participate in 12 of the 22 projects.

The awards, announced Wedneday, target advanced modeling and simulation solutions to specific challenges supporting key DOE missions in science, clean energy, and national security, as well as collaborations such as the Precision Medicine Initiative with the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, the press release said. [Read more…]

Alexander: Bill raises Office of Science funding to highest-ever, includes UPF, supercomputing, cleanup funding

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U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander

Lamar Alexander

A bill approved by a U.S. Senate subcommittee on Tuesday would give $5.144 billion to the federal agency that oversees work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It’s the highest level of funding ever for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which oversees 10 national labs, including ORNL, federal officials said.

The bill would also provide $430 million for the proposed Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex, which will “continue to keep this project on time and on budget,” according to a press release from the office of U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican.

Alexander’s office also said the legislation would provide funding for:

  • a new mercury treatment plant in Oak Ridge,
  • cleanup of nuclear facilities that are no longer in service,
  • nuclear infrastructure at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and
  • advanced computing, which supports the new Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The bill was unanimously approved on a voice vote by the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development on Tuesday afternoon. Alexander is chair of that subcommittee, and he said the approval shows that there is bipartisan support for energy research, waterways, and national security. [Read more…]

DOE looks to UT’s Dongarra for input on computing advances

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Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra

KNOXVILLE—The U.S. Department of Energy recently released a report through its Office of Science detailing the Top 10 research challenges in reaching the level of exascale computing, once again calling on Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a press release said.

Dongarra—a distinguished professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory and one of five National Academy of Engineering members at UT—has long been at the forefront of exascale computing, or computing at roughly a thousand times the capability of recent supercomputers.

An icon in his field, Dongarra is a lead author of the Top500, a list he helped start in 1993 to measure the world’s fastest computers as well as numerous software packages for high-performance computing. [Read more…]

DOE report co-chaired by UT professor calls for renewed focus on high-end math research

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Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra

Professor also ORNL researcher, co-author of Top 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers

KNOXVILLE—The U.S. Department of Energy recently released a report co-chaired by Jack Dongarra, a distinguished professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, in which he stresses the importance of prioritizing research into high-end mathematics to help keep the United States on the cutting edge of computing.

“Exascale computing (capable of one quintillion floating point operations per second) will enable us to solve problems in ways that are not feasible today and will result in significant scientific breakthroughs,” said Dongarra, of UT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “However, the transition to exascale poses numerous scientific and technological challenges.”

Dongarra, one of five National Academy of Engineering members on the faculty of UT’s College of Engineering, said that increased funding for the development of new models and ways of gathering data is key to unlocking a number of those challenges. [Read more…]