IBM Summit will be the world's fastest supercomputer
After it was reported that China has the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM unveiled a few details about its upcoming behemoth, which is already branded as the computer that will dethrone the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight.
IBM's supercomputer is called Summit. It is expected to reach US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in early 2018, and should have a quarter more computational power than originally intended.
Originally, the machine should have been capable of 150 petaflops. Instead, it will be capable of 200 petaflops. The Chinese Sunway TaihuLight is capable of 93 petaflops, 124.5 at peak performance. The deal is reportedly worth $325 million.
The machine will owe its power to IBM Power9 microprocessors, and nVidia’s Volta GPUs for maths co-processing. Titan, Summit’s predecessor, has more than 18,000 nodes, while Summit will have around 3,400.
Each node will come with at least 500GB of coherent memory, and 800GB of non-volatile RAM.
"To provide a high rate of I/O throughput, the nodes will be connected in a non-blocking fat-tree using a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect", Oak Ridge’s website says. "Upon completion, Summit will allow researchers in all fields of science unprecedented access to solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges".
The announcement came just days after it was unveiled that a Chinese-built machine was declared fastest. The most important part of it all was that the machine was built completely from Chinese parts, as an embargo prevents US companies from selling their products in China.
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