We, humans, are obsessed with “super”. From supercar, Superman, supersonic jet to superpower. We love every super thing. That is why love to build super things, as a result of our deposit we have more than 500 supercomputers around the world. We are not done here, we compete between super things.
Supercomputer “Summit” runs on RedHat Linux
Today’s super thing is yesterday’s top news. Again the superpower computer tittie is changed, we got a new title holder “Summit”! Let me introduce with this power savvy machine, the best news is its run on Redhat Linux! Linux buddies like us this is a news to talk about in our office break!
This 200 million dollars super machine is born from its ancestor “Titan” producer The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This device is capable of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops which give it the title the Fastest computer in the world by topping Sunway TaihuLight from China.
Linux lovers always take pride in their loving OS, This Summit will give one more point to hit on. Yes, Summit runs on Red Hat Enterprise edition.
This great milestone has been achieved by the contribution of silicon giant IBM and Nvidia. Under the roof of the US Department of Energy (DoE), they teamed up to beat China’s ‘Sunway TaihuLight‘ and result here it is.
Enormous Power – Supercomputer “Summit”
Under the hood it got enormous power, I mean enormous! This mega machine consists of 4068 computer servers(IBM AC922 system), each server includes(22-core IBM power 9 processor) with Nvidia Teslam v100 graphics processing unit(GPU) accelerator!
All these super machines are connected with each other by dual rail Mellanox EDR 100gb/s. It got 10 petabytes(1 PB = 1000000000000000B = 1015 bytes = 1000 terabytes.) of RAM and 250 petabytes of storage! Can you imagine! The IBM and Nvidia machines are interconnected with Nvidia NVLink interconnect which carries 300gb/s data! And guess what it consumes 13MW power when it runs in full throttle.
What is the Summit Supercomputer for?
So what this super machine can do? From our normal perspective, we can think, the summit can solve a calculation in a second which need 30 years for our home computer! So what is the US going to do with this super machine? This device is going to use for astrophysics, engineering, material science, cancer surveillance, system biology, engineering and goes on. The best news is its running on Linux, a topic to share with my Windows, apple friends!
The US is not going to stop here, their “summit” will become yesterday’s news headline by their 2021 exaflop supercomputer. Ah, we love the super stuff!
Note: In case you want to check the detailed specs and technical data, see the official article on Summit supercomputer.
