The US passed China with a supercomputer capable of as many calculations per second as 6.3 billion humans

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) together with IBM and Nvidia celebrated the official unveiling of the Department of Energy (DOE) Summit supercomputer today at an event presided over by DOE Secretary Rick Perry. The partners, who collaborated to design and build the estimated $200-million dollar machine under the CORAL procurement program, heralded it as the world’s most powerful supercomputer with 200 peak petaflops for high-performance computing workloads and 3.3 peak exaops for emerging AI workloads.

The deployment encompasses 4,608 compute nodes, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs, interconnected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand. Summit is said to offer 8X more performance than its predecessor, Titan, which spans 18,688 AMD-Nvidia nodes. The new supercomputer has a power footprint of 13MW, not a significant increase over Titan’s 9MW considering the massive performance leap. 

Perry upheld Summit’s installation as a sign of the United States’ global competitiveness and technological leadership:

“We know we’re in a competition and we know that this competition is real and it matters who gets there first,” said Perry. “Today [we] show the rest of the world that America is back in the game and we’re back in the game in a big way. Our national security, our economics, our scientific discovery, our energy research will be affected in a powerful way.”

Perry warned however that the U.S. also faces a challenge. “There are other nations that are racing to develop their technology; if we’re not dedicated and determined, the leadership we enjoy today could be the leadership of tomorrow and we don’t want that,” he said.

While this soft-launch (formal acceptance is scheduled for later this year) is an important milestone that is generating wide media attention, the HPC community proper is still awaiting and expects hard benchmarks; they won’t have to wait too much longer with the next Top500 list due out in two weeks. If Summit achieves the Linpack score that we’ve heard projected, roughly 120-petaflops, the United States could retake the Top500 crown from China, pending no surprises. China has held the top of the list since 2013 with the debut of the 33.9-petaflops (Linpack) Tianhe-2A. That machine fell to number two in 2016, when China stood up the 93-petaflops (Linpack) Sunway TaihuLight, which still holds the number one spot. The fastest U.S. machine is still the Oak Ridge Titan supercomputer, which entered the list at the number one position in November 2012 (with 17.6 Linpack petaflops) and now ranks fifth.