US are back on (with) SUMMIT of computational power

Roberto Saracco June 11, 2018 Blog 528 Views

The view inside one of the Summit supercomputer’s 4,608 servers. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US

Waiting for the official ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputer in the world the bet is that after a gap of 5 years the US are going to claim the N.1 spot of the ranking, displacing the Chinese Sunway TahiuLight computer with SUMMIT, the new supercomputer installed by IBM at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, US.

SUMMIT is a cluster of 37,000 processors, operating in its 4,608 servers. Over 15,000 litres (4,000 gallons) of water are used every minute to cool these processors that all together can deliver a processing capacity of 200 PFLOPS (200,000,000,000,000,000 floating instructions per second), the double of the current number one supercomputer in the top 500 ranking.

SUMMIT takes approximately the space of two tennis court. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

SUMMIT is going to challenge problems in biology, climate, energy, fuel consumption. Interestingly, most of these problems will be tackled using artificial intelligence as computational engine. Take a look at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory introducing SUMMIT and comparing it to their previous supercomputer TITAN.

SUMMIT was unveiled just few days ago, on June 8th 2018. You can look at the unveiling ceremony here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLamZ1RbTrM

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About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

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