Oak Ridge Today

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…]

ORNL building world’s smartest supercomputer

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This a graphical representation of the Summit computer cabinets. It is not a photograph of the final design. (Image courtesy ORNL/Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility)

This a graphical representation of the Summit computer cabinets. It is not a photograph of the final design. (Image courtesy ORNL/Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility)

 

Note: This story was last updated at 10 a.m. Aug. 8.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Wednesday said it is building the world’s smartest supercomputer.

The new supercomputer is called Summit. It will be located in a new data center next to Titan, which is now the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

Summit will be 5-10 times faster than Titan, ORNL said. It will move data five to 10 times faster, store eight times more data, and perform many more calculations simultaneously than Titan, the lab said in information provided by spokesperson Morgan McCorkle.

Summit will be the world’s smartest supercomputer because of its enormous memory and data handling capabilities as well as its unique machine learning processor design, McCorkle said.

“The first of Summit’s cabinets arrived Monday, and our team is in the process of uncrating and putting them in place,” McCorkle said in response to questions from Oak Ridge Today. [Read more…]