IBM

The world's most powerful new supercomputer is from IBM

Sirs, consider yourself duly presented to the Summit: a new supercomputer capable of making 200 million billion calculations per second. Summit's creation marks the first time in five years that a United States machine ranks as the most powerful machine in the world.The specifications of this $ 200 million machine challenge understanding. Built by IBM and Nvidia for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy, the Summit is a 200 petaflops machine, meaning it can do 20 quadrillion calculations per second. That's about a million times faster than an ordinary notebook. As the New York Times put it, a human would need 63 billion years to do what Summit can do in a second. Or, as pointed out by MIT Technology Review, "everyone on Earth would have to do a calculation per second, all day, for 305 days to figure out what the new machine can do in the blink of an eye."The machine, with its 4,608 servers, 9,216 central processing chips and 27,648 graphics processors, weighs 340 tons. The system is housed in a 859 m² room at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility in Tennessee. To keep this machine cool, 15,000 liters of water are pumped through the system. The 13 megawatts of energy needed to power this giant could illuminate more than 8,000 homes in the United States.
The Summit is now the most powerful supercomputer in the world, 60% faster than the former record owner, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight. This is the first time since 2013 that a computer built in the United States gets the title, showing that the US began to accompany its main competitor, China. The Summit is eight times more powerful than Titan, the second-ranked US supercomputer.As MIT Technology Review explains, Summit is the first supercomputer specifically designed to handle specific applications of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning and neural networks. Its thousands of IA-optimized chips, produced by Nvidia and IBM, allow the machine to process huge amounts of data for patterns imperceptible to humans. According to an Energy.gov statement, "the Summit will enable scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible."The Summit and machines like it can be used for all kinds of applications with many processors, like creating new aircraft, doing climate modeling, simulating nuclear explosions, creating new materials and finding causes for diseases. In fact, their potential to help in drug discovery is enormous; the Summit, for example, could be used to hunt relations between millions of genes and cancer. It could also assist with precision medicine, in which remedies and treatments are tailored for individual patients.

From this, we can expect a next generation of so-called "exascale" computers capable of running a billion billion (or a quintile) of calculations per second. And perhaps we do not have to wait so long: the first exascale computers can arrive in the first half of the 2020s.

Source: G. Dvorsky