NEW YORK – US tech giant International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer.
The supercomputer, called Summit, can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second – or 200 petaflops.
Summit’s performance exceeds twice than the currently available world’s most powerful machine – China’s SunwayTaihuLight supercomputer which has the processing power of 93 petaflops.
The new machine features 4,608 compute servers with two 22-core IBM Power 9 chips, six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU’s each and over 10 petabytes of memory.
Summit’s initial uses will include areas of astrophysics, cancer research, and systems biology.
Supercomputers are typically large, expensive systems featuring tens of thousands of processors designed to carry out specialized calculation-intensive tasks.
Summit is one of two of these next-generation supercomputers that IBM is building for the Department of Energy. The second one is Sierra, which will be housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Sierra, which is also scheduled to go online this year, is less powerful at an expected 125 petaflops.
