Scientists at IBM along with researchers at Mellanox, Nvidia and RedHat have unveiled an Artificial Intelligence (AI) focused world’s fastest supercomputer called Summit.
The supercomputer was turned on at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee which means that the United States has replaced China’s top place in the race of supercomputers – Previously, China was home to the fastest supercomputer in the world called TaihuLight.
It is being claimed that Summit is so powerful that it can conduct 200,000 trillion calculations per second or 200 petaflops which is as fast as 7.6 billion people on earth carrying 26 million calculations per second on a hand calculator.
Summit has over 10 petabytes of memory and 4,608 computer servers containing two IBM Power9 CPUs running at 3.1GHz with 22 processing cores operating in parallel. Furthermore, every Power9 chip is linked to Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics chips (GPUs).
Initially, the supercomputer will be used for cancer research, astrophysics, fusion energy, systems biology, and addiction treatment.
“Summit takes accelerated computing to the next level, with more computing power, more memory, an enormous high-performance file system and fast data paths to tie it all together. That means researchers will be able to get more accurate results faster,” said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences.
“Summit’s AI-optimized hardware also gives researchers an incredible platform for analyzing massive datasets and creating intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery.”
IBM is also working on a smaller version of Summit called Sierra, which will be unveiled this year and housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California. Although Sierra will be less powerful than Summit both systems will boost US’s capabilities in the field of artificial intelligence and computer technology.
As for IBM, the company is also working on the development of world’s tiniest computer (smaller than a grain of salt) that will cost less than ten cents to manufacture and can monitor, analyze, communicate, and even act on data.
