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NNSA signs $600 million contract to build its first exascale supercomputer

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Image courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The National Nuclear Security Administration has signed a $600 million contract with Cray Inc. to build the first exascale supercomputer for the NNSA at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

It is one of three exascale systems to be built at U.S. Department of Energy or NNSA laboratories. The other two exascale machines will be at DOE laboratories: Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago and Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

ORNL currently has the most powerful supercomputer in the world, Summit, and LLNL has the second-fastest, Sierra. They are both petaflop systems. Summit is capable of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second.

All three of the new exascale supercomputers will be built by Cray using their Shasta architecture, Slingshot interconnect, and new system software platform, the NNSA said in a press release Tuesday.

An exascale computer will be able to solve calculations up to 50 times faster than today’s top supercomputers, exceeding a quintillion, or 1018, calculations per second. That’s a billion billion calculations per second.

[Read more…]

World’s two fastest supercomputers at DOE labs

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

The United States has the two fastest supercomputers in the world, and they are both at U.S. Department of Energy laboratories.

DOE and its National Nuclear Security Administration have two other supercomputers in the top 10.

“DOE’s national labs have some of the brightest minds in the world, which have made America a worldwide leader in high-performance computing hardware, software, and applications,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said in a press release Monday. “We are well-positioned to maintain this leadership as we enter the era of exascale computing, which holds enormous promise for our country and will transform our leadership in science, our economy, and our nation’s security.”

As reported by Oak Ridge Today on Monday, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is still the fastest supercomputer in the world.

[Read more…]

(For members) Three national labs building exascale computers

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The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL)

Three national laboratories, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are building new computer systems that could be many times more powerful than today’s top supercomputers.

The new machines are exascale systems. None have been delivered yet, but the planning for them started more than a year ago and the new high-performance systems could be delivered to the three laboratories in the next several years. Planning for the exascale computers was under way even before the world’s most powerful supercomputer, a petaflop system called Summit at ORNL, was unveiled in June 2018.

Exascale computers could be 50 to 100 more powerful than today’s petaflop computers, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Besides ORNL, they could be located at Argonne National Laboratory southwest of Chicago and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco. The first system is expected at Argonne, followed by a second system at ORNL.

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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…]

New Chinese supercomputer named world’s fastest; ORNL’s Titan drops to No. 3

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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, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012 but is now ranked No. 3. (File photo courtesy ORNL/October 2013)

 

China maintained its number one ranking in the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, but with a new system built entirely using processors designed and made in China.

China now has the top two supercomputers on the semiannual TOP500 list, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from number two to number three.

The new Chinese supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, is capable of 93 petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second, a press release said.

It displaced Tianhe-2, an Intel-based Chinese supercomputer that had claimed the number one spot on the past six TOP500 lists. Tianhe-2 achieved a speed of 33.86 petaflops, or more than 33,000 trillion calculations per second, in a test known as the LINPACK benchmark.

Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at ORNL, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, achieved 17.59 petaflops.

Titan was the top system for a short time. It was number one in November 2012, but it was bumped to number two behind Tianhe-2 in June 2013. This is the first time it has been number three.

The latest list marks the first time since the start of the TOP500 that the United States is not home to the largest number of systems. With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the last few years, China leads with 167 systems and the U.S. is second with 165. China also leads the performance category, thanks to the number one and number two systems, the press release said. [Read more…]

Chinese supercomputer stays No. 1, Titan at ORNL still No. 2

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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, which was the world’s top supercomputer in November 2012 but is now ranked No. 2. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

 

For the fourth consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the world’s number one system. Meanwhile, Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was the top supercomputer in November 2012, remains number two.

Tianhe-2 is capable of performing at 33.86 petaflops, or 33.86 quadrillions of calculations per second, on a benchmark test known as Linpack.

The rankings are from the 44th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, which was announced Monday in Mannheim, Germany; Berkeley, California; and Knoxville. Tianhe-2 has been in the top spot four consecutive times, and Titan has been number two each time. [Read more…]

Chinese supercomputer bumps ORNL’s Titan from No. 1 spot

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Tianhe-2 Lights

Lights on the Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which has a theoretical peak that is twice as fast as the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Jack Dongarra)

A Chinese supercomputer has bumped the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the No. 1 spot on a semiannual ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The Tianhe-2, which was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, is capable of 33.86 petaflops, or more than 33,000 trillion calculations per second.

Now ranked No. 2, Titan was able to perform 17,000 trillion calculations per second, or 17.59 petaflops, according to the list published in November. [Read more…]

Theoretically twice as fast, Chinese supercomputer could bump Titan from No. 1 spot

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Tianhe-2 Lights

Lights on the Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which has a theoretical peak that is twice as fast as the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Jack Dongarra)

A new Chinese supercomputer is theoretically twice as fast as the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it could bump Titan from the No. 1 spot on the Top 500 list that will come out on June 17, one of the co-authors of the list said Wednesday.

Titan, which reached the No. 1 spot on the semiannual Top 500 list in November, has a theoretical peak of 27 petaflops, or roughly 27,000 trillion calculations per second.

The Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-2, also known as TH-2 or Milkyway-2, has a theoretical peak of 54.9 petaflops. It also has about twice as much memory as the Titan system, said Jack Dongarra, a Top 500 co-author, University of Tennessee faculty member, and distinguished research staff member in ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division. [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.

[Read more…]

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.”

[Read more…]

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