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posted by martyb on Saturday June 09 2018, @12:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-can-it-play-Crysis? dept.

Since 2013, Chinese machines have occupied the number one slot in rankings of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Now America is back on top again. Engineers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee have just unveiled Summit, a supercomputer with enough processing power to surpass the current record holder, China's Sunway TaihuLight.

The new machine is capable, at peak performance, of 200 petaflops—200 million billion calculations a second. To put that in context, everyone on earth would have to do a calculation every second of every day for 305 days to crunch what the new machine can do in the blink of an eye. Summit is 60 percent faster than the TaihuLight and almost eight times as fast as a machine called Titan, which is also housed at Oak Ridge and held the US supercomputing speed record until Summit's arrival.

[...] Jack Wells of Oak Ridge says the experience of building Summit, which fills an area the size of two tennis courts and carries 4,000 gallons of water a minute through its cooling system to carry away about 13 megawatts of heat, will help inform work on exascale machines, which will require even more impressive infrastructure. Things like Summit's advanced memory management and the novel, high-bandwidth linkages that connect its chips will be essential for handling the vast amounts of data exascale machines will generate. Scientists at the national lab say they've already leveraged Summit's AI smarts to conduct what is effectively an exascale comparative genomics calculation. Thanks to these and other advances, Summit will help us reach even more impressive peaks of computing power.

The world's most powerful supercomputer

Also Covered by

Move Over, China: U.S. Is Again Home to World's Speediest Supercomputer (The New York Times)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Launches America's New Top Supercomputer for Science

The World's Most Powerful Supercomputer Is an Absolute Beast (GIZMODO)


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:05AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:05AM (#690618) Journal

    June 2018 TOP500 and Green500 lists should be out within the next couple of weeks.

    Looks like we get to call <1 exaflops supercomputers "exascale" now because they can do a couple exaops of lower-precision operations for A.I.

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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:32PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:32PM (#690909)

    still quite impressive. If you read abit about the Nvidia chips they do some lower precision (FP16) operations ~10x faster than FP32 or FP64.

    Some *real* maths can be accelerated by using lower precision and accumulating more often. Since it is 10x faster, 2x operations you still win.

    I'm still waiting for my Titan V, when they come back in stock...;-)

    I'm hoping to get some molecule wobbling next-gen style!