IBM and NVIDIA to MAGA with the 200 petaflops Summit supercomputer

The latest Top500 supercomputer list reveals China has not only the fastest but also the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. The Titan supercomputer of the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory ranks fifth but the US has a shot of becoming great again as the lab's upcoming Summit supercomputer should propel it to the top of the list.

Summit is expected to be ready in 2018 and will have a raw computing performance of roughly 200 petaflops, double as much as the 93 petaflops delivered by China's Sunway TaihuLight. It's pretty interesting how fast things are moving along in the supercomputer world, the current second-fastest supercomputer has 33.8 petaflops and the third fastest model has just 19.59 petaflops. The Summit supercomputer is projected to be faster than the current top 5 supercomputer combined!

Made by IBM, the Summit supercomputer will feature about 4,600 watercooled nodes, an individual node packs two IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Volta GV100 GPUs. Each node also has 512GB of coherent DDR4 and HBM2, as well as 1600GB non-volatile RAM.

The system features 96 lanes of PCIe 4.0 that comes in handy for the dual-port Mellanox EDR InfiniBand adapter, which has a theoretical maximum throughput of 400Gb/s. IBM has measured throughput at 392Gb/s, which is twice the bandwidth of a PCIe 3.0 adapter.

The Volta GV100's connect via PCIe 3.0 and NVLink 2.0. The NVLink interface provides 100GB/s of throughput for CPU-to-GPU and GPU-to-GPU traffic. The GPUs are arranged in a dual-mesh design.

More specs can be found at Tom's Hardware. Summit will consume a whopping 15MW of power, a significant increase from Titan's 9MW. However, Summit delivers over eleven times the performance of Titan so there's definitely a huge increase in power efficiency. The supercomputer will be used to simulate and explore complex systems.