Everyday Leadership

Big day for US ingenuity, technology, research, and development.

Excerpts: 

Call it the most powerful scientific tool ever built. Call it a new paradigm of computing. Just don’t call it slow, because whatever number you look at, Summit — which made its debut Friday at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — is flat-out fast.

This massive machine, powered by 27,648 of our Volta Tensor Core GPUs, can perform more than three exaops, or 3 billion billion calculations per second. That’s more than 100 times faster than Titan, previously the fastest U.S. supercomputer, completed just five years ago. And 95 percent of that computing power comes from GPUs.

Built for the U.S. Department of Energy, this is a machine designed to tackle the grand challenges of our time. It will accelerate the work of the world’s best scientists in high-energy physics, materials discovery, healthcare and more, with the ability to crank out 200 petaflops of computing power to high-precision scientific simulations.

Summit is as big as two tennis courts and has 9,216 processors boosted with 27,648 graphics chips. The system and its twin at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California were funded in 2014 as part of a $325 million Department of Energy program called Coral, but Summit took years to develop. 

What's Summit good for? At Oak Ridge, it'll be scientific research into subjects like designing chemical formula, exploring new materials, studying links between cancer and genes on a very large scale, investigating fusion energy, researching the universe through astrophysics and simulating the earth's changing climate.

Lawrence Livermore, a lab funded chiefly by DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, has a more militaristic mission, including stockpiling stewardship research to ensure nuclear weapons reliability.

#SUMMIT