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Summit or OLCF-4 was a
supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
developed by
IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...
, United States of America. It held the number 1 position on the
TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...
list from June 2018 to June 2020. As of June 2024, its LINPACK benchmark was clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS. Summit was decommissioned on November 15, 2024. As of November 2019, the supercomputer had ranked as the 5th most energy efficient in the world with a measured power efficiency of 14.668 gigaFLOPS/watt. Summit was the first supercomputer to reach exaflop (a quintillion operations per second) speed, on a non-standard metric, achieving 1.88 exaflops during a genomic analysis and is expected to reach 3.3 exaflops using mixed-precision calculations.


History

The
United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear w ...
awarded a $325 million contract in November 2014 to IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox. The effort resulted in construction of Summit and Sierra. Summit is tasked with civilian scientific research and is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Sierra is designed for nuclear weapons simulations and is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Summit was estimated to cover and require of cabling, and was designed to be used for research in diverse fields such as
cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe, the cosmos. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', with the meaning of "a speaking of the wo ...
,
medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...
, and
climatology Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "slope"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. Climate concerns the atmospher ...
. In 2015, the project called Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) included a third supercomputer named
Aurora An aurora ( aurorae or auroras), also commonly known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly observed in high-latitude regions (around the Arc ...
and was planned for installation at
Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United Sta ...
. By 2018, Aurora was re-engineered with completion anticipated in 2021 as an exascale computing project along with
Frontier A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary. Australia The term "frontier" was frequently used in colonial Australia in the meaning of country that borders the unknown or uncivilised, th ...
and El Capitan to be completed shortly thereafter. Aurora was completed in late 2022.


Uses

The Summit supercomputer was built for research in energy, artificial intelligence, human health, and other areas. It has been used in earthquake simulation, extreme weather simulation, materials science, genomics, and predicting the lifetime of neutrinos.


Design

Each of its 4,608 nodes consist of 2 IBM POWER9 CPUs, 6 Nvidia Tesla GPUs, with over 600 GB of coherent memory (96 GB HBM2 plus 512 GB DDR4) which is addressable by all CPUs and GPUs, plus 800 GB of non-volatile RAM that can be used as a burst buffer or as extended memory. The POWER9 CPUs and Nvidia Volta GPUs are connected using Nvidia's high speed
NVLink NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications protocol, communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central ...
. This allows for a heterogeneous computing model. To provide a high rate of data throughput, the nodes are connected in a non-blocking fat-tree topology using a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect for both storage and inter-process communications traffic, which delivers both 200 Gbit/s bandwidth between nodes and in-network computing acceleration for communications frameworks such as MPI and SHMEM/ PGAS. The storage for Summit has a fast in-system layer and a center-wide parallel filesystem layer. The in-system layer is optimized for fast storage with SSDs on each node, while the center-wide parallel file system provides easy to access data stored on hard drives. The two layers work together seamlessly so users do not have to differentiate their storage needs. The center-wide parallel file system is GPFS (IBM Storage Scale). It provides 250PB of storage. The cluster delivers 2.5 TB/s of single stream read peak throughput and 1 TB/s of 1M file throughput. It was one of the first supercomputers that also required extremely fast metadata performance to support AI/ML workloads exemplified by the 2.6M 32k file creates per second it delivers.


See also

* Titan (supercomputer) – OLCF-3 * Frontier (supercomputer) – OLCF-5 *
TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...
* OpenBMC * Red Hat Enterprise Linux


References


External links


A time-lapse video of Summit construction
{{S-end GPGPU supercomputers IBM supercomputers Oak Ridge National Laboratory Petascale computers 64-bit computers