Summit is the fastest supercomputer ever

Source: NVIDIA blog post. The Summit supercomputer sprawls over an area the size of two tennis courts.

Summit — which made its debut 8 June in the US — is powered by 27,648 NVIDIA Volta Tensor Core GPUs, and can perform more than three exaops, or 3 billion billion calculations per second. This is more than 100 times faster than Titan, which used to be the fastest US supercomputer. Both supercomputers are from the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“Summit is fast, but what Summit means is even more remarkable,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at Summit’s debut. “Summit is a magnificent scientific instrument that will attract the world’s great scientists.”

 “Summit is a new breed of computer,” Huang added. “Summit is the world’s largest AI supercomputer, a machine that learns. Its software will write software — amazing software that no human can write.”

In 2012, the team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory decided to put a GPU in every node when they built a new supercomputer. That work reshaped supercomputing. Instead of one GPU per node, Summit has six Tensor Core GPUs, delivering 10x Titan’s simulation performance.

 "And just as Titan inspired the world to accelerate simulations, Summit will inspire the world’s scientists to harness AI to drive discovery hand in hand with simulation," said Ian Buck, VP, NVIDIA's Accelerated Computing business unit in a blog post. "The technology powering Summit is already speeding the work of scientists on everything from PCs to servers, workstations to sprawling cloud computing systems."

Five facts about the world’s fastest supercomputer:

- Running at at 200 petaflops: If everyone on Earth did one calculation/second, it would take a year to do what Summit does in 1 second.

- Running at 3 exaops — If everyone on Earth did one calculation/second, it would take 15 years to do what Summit can do in 1 second.

- In an early test, a genomics team solved a problem in 1 hour that would take 30 years on a PC.

- Its 5,600 sq ft of cabinet space are similar in size to two tennis courts.

- Summit has the approximate weight of a commercial jet.