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Titan, once the world’s fastest computer, will be retired Aug. 1

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The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory debuted as the fastest computer in the world in 2012, and it remained in the top 10 for seven years, providing billions of core hours of total computing time to researchers from around the world. The system will be decommissioned on Aug. 1, 2019, and its data center space will be retrofitted for a new supercomputer, Frontier. (Photo by ORNL)

A supercomputer that was once the world’s fastest will be retired at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on August 1.

The supercomputer is a Cray XK7 machine called Titan. It is operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. It’s a petaflop system capable of performing up to 27 quadrillion calculations per second.

Titan was the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012, but it was bumped to number two by Tianhe-2, a Chinese supercomputer in June 2013. Still, Titan continued to rank as one of the world’s top 10 fastest supercomputers from its debut at number one in 2012 until this June, when it dropped to number 12.

In June, ORNL said Titan, which has been operating for seven years, will be decommissioned on August 1 and disassembled for recycling. Titan will be removed to make room for a new, much more powerful supercomputer, Frontier. That will be an exascale system capable of 1.5 exaflops, or 1.5 quintillion calculations per second (a billion billion calculations per second). Frontier will be a $600 million Cray computer that is expected to be the world’s most powerful when it debuts in 2021.

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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. â€œWe 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.

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ORNL’s Summit remains world’s most powerful supercomputer

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The 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 Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remains the world’s most powerful, according to a ranking list released Monday.

It’s the third time that Summit, a IBM-built supercomputer, has been number one on the semiannual TOP500 list of of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Summit debuted at number one in June 2018. That was the first time since 2012 that the United States had the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Summit retained the top spot in November.

The Sierra supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, remained at number two on the list released Monday, after climbing there from number three in November. The United States continues to have the top two systems in the world, a position that China held a year and a half ago.

Officials celebrated the launch of Summit in a ceremony attended by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry on June 8, 2018. The supercomputer is capable of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. That makes it about eight times more powerful than Titan, its predecessor, which was once the world’s fastest.

Summit delivered a record 148.6 petaflops on a benchmark test called High Performance Linpack, or HPL, a TOP500 press release said Monday. That was a slight improvement from six months ago, when Summit scored 143.5 petaflops. Summit debuted at 122.3 petaflops in June 2018.

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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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(For members) Three national labs building exascale computers

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

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

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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Seven ORNL researchers named 2019 INCITE award winners

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jeremy Smith is studying the recalcitrance of biomass to enable cheaper, more efficient biofuels, and other high-value chemicals. (Image courtesy ORNL)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jeremy Smith is studying the recalcitrance of biomass to enable cheaper, more efficient biofuels, and other high-value chemicals. (Image courtesy ORNL)

 

Seven researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been chosen by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, also known as INCITE, program to lead scientific investigations that require the nation’s most powerful computers, a press release said.

INCITE awards computing time via a proposal process to researchers seeking to harness the power of DOE computing systems at the Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities to solve some of the world’s greatest scientific challenges, the press release said.

Since INCITE’s inception in 2004, the ALCF and OLCF have continuously undergone significant upgrades to retain their edge in facilitating the most computationally demanding scientific projects. The ALCF’s most recent machine is Theta, an 11.69-petaflop Cray XC40 system whose 280,000-plus cores make it ideal for research at the nexus of simulation, data science, and machine learning. An even more powerful system, the exascale Aurora, is planned for deployment in 2021 and is projected to be capable of a quintillion (one billion billion) calculations per second. [Read more…]

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…]

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 names director of artificial intelligence

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David Womble

David Womble

 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has hired David Womble, a leader in high-performance computing and former executive at Sandia National Laboratories, to direct its artificial intelligence work.

Womble began as AI Program Director on October 30, a press release said. AI stands for artificial intelligence.

Womble’s responsibilities include guiding ORNL’s AI and machine learning strategy for high-performance computing, ensuring broad scientific impacts to the missions of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and providing long-range program planning and project leadership, the press release said.

“In more than three decades in computing, Womble has won two R&D100 awards and the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize, awarded each year ‘to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing,'” the press release said. [Read more…]