IBM Summit Supercomputer

2018: IBM started the most powerful supercomputer in the world

In June, 2018 the Summit supercomputer which developers call the fastest in the world was started. The computer system through joint efforts was created by the IBM company and Laboratory Ouk-Ridge (   Oak Ridge National Laboratory,  ORNL) entering into the U.S. Department of Energy.

Performance of Summit is stated at the level of 200 petaFLOPS — 200 thousand  trillion  calculations per second. At the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer  which was considered as the most powerful in the world before the indicator is equal about 93 petaFLOPS.

Summit is the supercomputer with a performance of 200 petaFLOPS

The machine developed by IBM and ORNL includes 4608 servers, each of which uses two 22-core IBM Power9 processors. Amount of RAM reaches 10 PBytes, transfers the TechCrunch edition. 

Summit occupies the space of two tennis courts and more airplane weighs. Cooling of the system optimized for work with artificial intelligence requires more than 15 thousand liters of water.

Commenting on Summit start, the United States Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said that the supercomputer will have a great influence on researches in the field of power, discoveries, economic competitiveness and national security.

Scientists intend to use computing power of a system among other things for  search of possible communications between genes and  cancer diseases  and also between emergence of dependences on  narcotic substances. The device can also help with  climatic modeling that will increase efficiency of a weather forecast.

Summit became one of two supercomputers of new generation which IBM develops for the American Ministry of Energy. The second complex — Sierra — will be placed in Livermore National Laboratory of Lawrence later in 2018. The expected capacity of the machine will be 125 petaFLOPS.^[1]

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