The US Department of energy introduced the world’s most powerful supercomputer, selected the title from the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight. Peak performance supercomputer American Summit reached 200 petaflops. (200 quadrillion calculations per second). This is more than twice the peak performance of the Chinese system, which is 93 petaflops, and about 7 times the performance of Titan supercomputer – in the past the most powerful supercomputer in the United States located in the same National laboratory oak ridge, which established a new system.
The productivity Summit is so high that the system is able in one hour to cope with tasks that a normal desktop can take up to 30 years.
The Summit supercomputer consists of 4608 server stations, occupying a total area of two tennis courts. System in total uses more than 9 thousand 22-core processors IBM Power9, working in tandem with more than 27 000 NVIDIA Tesla V100. Consumed by the supercomputer, Summit energy, enough to power the 8100 homes. Of course, such a roaster must be efficiently cooled, so through the channels of the cooling system of the supercomputer each minute that passes more than 18,000 liters of water.
American supercomputer Summit not only failed to take away the title of most powerful supercomputer in the world, which holds the Chinese system over the last five years. A new supercomputer was designed specifically for tasks associated with the work of artificial intelligence; the system can use the methods of machine and deep learning to solve problems in medicine, physics, climate research and many other areas.
The first use of the Summit of scientists has already taken place. In the framework solves the problem exaflops class (a billion billion operations calculations per second, or 1 exop (exaop)). The system was used to analyze millions of genomes and showed that the performance of 1.88 exoops, which is twice higher than the previous most powerful supercomputer. Peak power Summit, said its creators, with a mixed-precision calculations can reach up to 3.3 Axapta. It is noted that by 2021 in the US plan to create a full-fledged computer ecosystem exaflops level, and development Summit is one of the important steps for the implementation of this plan.
With the new supercomputer, scientists plan to analyze the data of the explosions of stars (supernova) to determine characteristics of distribution in the Universe such rare elements like gold. In addition, it is planned to conduct simulations aimed at the development of new types of materials that will be used for the production of a new generation of semiconductors. Also through the analysis of huge amounts of data about population health scientists are gonna use a new supercomputer to look for a link between the factors contributing to cancer – the same genes, for example, and other biological markers, and environments. The supercomputer also will be used for the analysis of other pathogenic markers, resulting in, for example, to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, diseases of the cardiovascular system, as well as various dependencies.
“Summit opens the possibility to conduct the full range of new scientific research that were simply impossible before its appearance,” — says in a press release, Dan Jacobson, a specialist in the field of computational biology National laboratory oak ridge.
In the United States represented the most powerful supercomputer in the world
Nikolai Khizhnyak