Oak Ridge Today

New 200-petaflop supercomputer to succeed Titan at ORNL

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Summit Supercomputer Cabinets Graphic

This a graphical representation of the Summit computer cabinets. It is not a photograph of the final design. (Image courtesy ORNL/November 2014)

 

A new 200-petaflop supercomputer will succeed Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it could be available to scientists and researchers in 2018, a spokesperson said this week.

The new IBM supercomputer, named Summit, could about double the computing power of what is now the world’s fastest machine, a Chinese system named Sunway TaihuLight, according to a seminannual list of the world’s top supercomputers released in June.

Sunway TaihuLight is capable of 93 petaflops, according to the list, the TOP500 list. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Summit, which is expected to start operating at ORNL early in 2018, is one of three supercomputers that the U.S. Department of Energy expects to exceed 100 petaflops at three U.S. Department of Energy laboratories in 2018. The three planned systems are:

  • the 200-petaflop Summit at ORNL, which is expected to be available to users in early 2018;
  • a 150-petaflop machine known as Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco in mid-2018; and
  • a 180-petaflop supercomputer called Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in late 2018.

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Titan supercomputer at ORNL completes acceptance testing

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Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ranked as the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

By Leo Williams

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer has completed rigorous acceptance testing to ensure the functionality, performance, and stability of the machine, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems for open science.

The U.S. Department of Energy machine, the first to combine different types of processing units to maximize performance at such a large scale, ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2012 list published at http://www.top500.org/. Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer, is capable of more than 27,000 trillion calculations each second—or 27 petaflops. [Read more…]

Titan repairs complete, ORNL preparing for second round of supercomputer testing

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Jeff Nichols and Titan at ORNL

Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, the world’s fastest supercomputer. (Photos courtesy of ORNL)

Connectors in the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been repaired, and workers are preparing the world’s fastest machine for a second round of acceptance testing, an official said Monday.

That testing could allow the $100 million machine to be put into full production mode by the end of this month or early May, said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences.

Titan won’t be available to researchers for a short period while the lab re-runs acceptance tests. [Read more…]

Cray re-soldering Titan’s connectors, supercomputer testing could be done in April

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Jeff Nichols and Titan at ORNL

Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, the world’s fastest supercomputer. (Photos courtesy of ORNL)

Hundreds of connectors are being re-soldered each week, and the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—the world’s fastest machine—could be in regular production by May, a lab official said Wednesday.

Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences, said connectors on the $100 million computer’s motherboards had too much gold, and solder was interacting with the gold on connector pins, making the solder unstable and leading to cracks.

There are about 20,000 of the pencil-sized connectors, which link central and graphic processing units, or CPUs and GPUs. Each connector has about 100 pins.

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World’s fastest supercomputer at ORNL more about research than rankings

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Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now ranked as the world’s fastest. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

The No. 1 ranking for the new Titan supercomputer, designating it as the most powerful in the world, was clearly appreciated in East Tennessee on Monday.

But even as they celebrated a return to the top spot, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the giant computer is based, said they are focused more on research than rankings.

“We love being No. 1,” said Bronson Messer, acting group leader for scientific computing at the National Center for Computational Science at ORNL. “It’s great recognition. But what really matters is what science will do with the machine.”

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