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US Once Again Boasts the World's Fastest Supercomputer (zdnet.com)

The US Department of Energy on Friday unveiled Summit, a supercomputer capable of performing 200 quadrillion calculations per second, or 200 petaflops. Its performance should put it at the top of the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, which is currently dominated by China. From a report (thanks to reader cb_abq for the tip): Summit, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was built for AI. IBM designed a new heterogeneous architecture for Summit, which combines IBM POWER9 CPUs with Nvidia GPUs. It has approximately 4,600 nodes, with six Nvidia Volta Tensor Core GPUs per node -- that's more than 27,000. The last US supercomputer to top the list of the world's fastest was Titan, in 2012. ORNL, which houses Titan as well, says Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan's 18,688 nodes.

85 comments

  1. We need ... by PPH · · Score: 1

    ... a Beowulf cluster of these.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
    1. Re:We need ... by istartedi · · Score: 1

      Wow, doesn't that bring back the memories? It's like Ogg hit me with an Open Source CD or something.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    2. Re:We need ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what the CORAL project will produce. A Beowulf cluster of these. ;)

    3. Re:We need ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But can it play Crysis?

  2. Imagine a Beowulf cluster . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Actually Linux wins again, the Summit runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7.

    1. Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hot dang.. Redhat from 2008 is still being used and in supercomputing no less.. No crappy Systemd for them!

    2. Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I realize a lot of dyslexic mongoloid arseperger tards read slashdot. And you are one of them.

      It's RED HAT 7.4 you ignorant slut. Now blow me.

  3. Great Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thank God for Commander of Cheese, Predisent Trump.

  4. After the date by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ima wanna do the IMOGENE COCABERRY
    You want lobster? heh, i'm thinking IMOGENE COCABERRY!

  5. But ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Will it mine PedoPesos?

  6. USA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    USA USA USA!

    1. Re:USA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      USA USA USA!

      USB USB USB!

      Firewire Firewire Firewire!

      Thunderbolt Thunderbolt Thunderbolt

    2. Re: USA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apps, apps, apps!!!

  7. The Fastest by JBMcB · · Score: 0

    This is kinda silly. The fastest supercomputer is going to be whomever has built the newest one. Moore's law is slowing down a tiny bit, but it's still going. Someone spending $100,000,000 on a supercomputer today is going to have a slower machine than someone building one for the same amount in a year's time.

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
    1. Re:The Fastest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Keen insight like this is why I keep returning to Slashdot. You won't find this anywhere else, folks.

    2. Re:The Fastest by ranton · · Score: 1

      This is kinda silly. The fastest supercomputer is going to be whomever has built the newest one. Moore's law is slowing down a tiny bit, but it's still going. Someone spending $100,000,000 on a supercomputer today is going to have a slower machine than someone building one for the same amount in a year's time.

      While I agree it is silly, the top 10 supercomputers are not in chronological order. Their commission dates and ranking are listed below. The top 5 newest supercomputers in this list are #1, 3, 4, 8, 9 in PFlops. Considering the 5 newest supercomputers average a rank of #5 and the 5 oldest supercomputers on the top 10 list have an average rank of #6, there is little correlation between age and computational power among the top machines. That has far more to do with what the machines were built to do and what budget they had, not the year they were built. Being newer does make your dollar stretch much further though.

      1) 2016
      2) 2013
      3) 2016
      4) 2017
      5) 2012
      6) 2013
      7) 2015
      8) 2016
      9) 2016
      10) 2011

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    3. Re:The Fastest by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 1

      The fastest supercomputer is going to be whomever has built the newest one.

      Not necessarily. IBM is also building a newer . . . slower . . . supercomputer for the DoE:

      Summit is one of two of these next-generation supercomputers that IBM is building for the DEO. The second one is Sierra, which will be housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sierra, which is also scheduled to go online this year, is less powerful at an expected 125 petaflops, but both systems are significantly more powerful than any other machine in the DoE’s arsenal right now.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    4. Re:The Fastest by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 1

      Nobody is going to win in Somalia, that's for sure, but it still takes tech-know how, not just $$$ and timing. HPC is NOT like building a gaming PC, man.

    5. Re:The Fastest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      if you think this cost anywhere near the ballpark of only $100mil, you're very far from the real number. There's no official release of the cost, though I've seen articles that ballpark it around $600mil - I think they're underestimating it though. Just a DS8886 storage cabinet alone is a good $1mil. This thing is moving 4,000 gallons of water pump through Summit’s cooling system every minute, carrying away about 13 megawatts of heat. Stores 250 petabytes of data, weighs over 340 tons (think about the infrastructure needed,) connected by 185 miles of fiber optic cables, etc. I think it's probably a little over a billion $.

    6. Re:The Fastest by iamhassi · · Score: 2

      Someone spending $100,000,000 on a ANYTHING today is going to have a slower machine than someone building one for the same amount in a year's time.

      Fixed that for you. You could say the same about anything really, because everything is getting faster, smaller, lighter, etc.

      --
      my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    7. Re:The Fastest by iamhassi · · Score: 1

      While I agree it is silly, the top 10 supercomputers are not in chronological order. Their commission dates and ranking are listed below. The top 5 newest supercomputers in this list are #1, 3, 4, 8, 9 in PFlops.

      But he said if they spent the same amount next year it would be faster, which is true. We don't know the prices of the machines you listed.

      --
      my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    8. Re:The Fastest by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      Quite a few systems lasted more than six months at number one. among them

      ASCI Red
      Earth Simulator
      BlueGene/L
      Numerical Wind Tunnel
      Roadrunner
      Tianhe-2
      Sunway

      And some computers were only on top for an instant.

    9. Re:The Fastest by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      everything is getting faster, smaller, lighter, etc.

      My wife's sister is not.

    10. Re:The Fastest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ya hpc are typically simpler component and build wise then a good gaming pc...

    11. Re:The Fastest by mikael · · Score: 1

      Supercomputers these days are superscalar, so you can add as many racks and shelves of nodes as you have space and money for. When they do upgrades, they just swap out the old slowest nodes and add new nodes with the faster CPUs and GPU's.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    12. Re:The Fastest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why would the Department of Education need that? Have you seen those kids' scores?

      What? More Administration jobs for relatives? Oh, OK.

  8. Big iron-y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But it still can't beat a human at tic-tac-toe.

    1. Re: Big iron-y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But maybe it can beat *you*

    2. Re:Big iron-y by mikael · · Score: 1

      Good players at tic-tac-toe will always end up in a draw.

      But you don't even need an electronic computer to achieve this. The Tinkertoy computer was made entirely out of string and balsa wood:

      http://www.computerhistory.org...

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    3. Re:Big iron-y by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      t could have been built by any six-year old with 500 boxes of tinker toys and a PDP-10.

      what sort of child has a pdp-10?

  9. Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by Invisible+Now · · Score: 1

    If you had access to a computer this powerful, what would you do with it? just asking...

    --

    "Knowing everything doesn't help..."

  10. Can You Say . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bitcoin mining? Yep I thought you could. :)

    What good is a supercomputer if it can't earn some moola!? :D

    1. Re:Can You Say . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You joke but the sooner we hit bitcoin's numerical qunatity limit the sooner we find out "how much" it's really worth. Then all that bullshit can stop.

  11. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 2

    If you had access to a computer this powerful, what would you do with it? just asking...

    . . . in other news . . . the DoE has just announced that they own 51% of the Bitcoin Universe . . .

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  12. Re:First by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From the fine article:

    We were amazed at how fast it booted Windows 10 Enterprise Edition - just under 34 minutes!"

    But to be fair, the article continues, we had 100,000 of the fastest blue screens from Windows' false
    starts ever witnessed by humans. Quite the sight!

    CAP === 'wideband' <-- It's not even a word!

  13. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by AlwinBarni · · Score: 2

    There are several very useful for humanity topics, requiring lots of calculations:
    - fusion, whether for tokamacs or stellarators
    - proteins for medicine
    - properties of alloys
    - PI (to see if Carl Sagan was joking or was he on to something ;)

  14. Go team USA. Suck it China. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 0

    Anyone who thinks the USA is down and out and can't win at tech needs to refactor their bullshit. The Chinese should stick to making cheap flip flops and Christmas lights for Wal-Mart. Ha-fucking-Ha!

    1. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't say the US is done, BUT who do you think fabs the chips at the heart of this thing, you know the GPU's. That's right TAIWAN semiconductor microelectronics corp. You know the one in Taiwan. Further, one of the founders of Nvidea is a Taiwan immigrant, again, you know the kind of people trump wants to keep out. You are an idiot if you think we are anything but neck in neck with China.

    2. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Their slanty-eyed fucking rice burner so-called "super computers" are nothing but hopped up "Speak 'n' Spells" augmented with primitive chicken scratch Chinese hieroglyphic pictograms that they call "writing". Ching Chong Chung Chinamen.

    3. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Legal immigrant.

    4. Re: Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If it's running on any Intel equipment, then it is doubtless being manufactured in the USA, as that is where Intel's best fabs are located.

      Also keep in mind that when Intel CPUs say made in Malaysia, Singapore, etc, that just means they were assembled there.

    5. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He's sort of right. Everyone seems to go out of their way to praise China for their accomplishments and denigrate and question US accomplishments. The US is by no means omnipotent across all sectors of achievement. Despite all the hype about China's military closing the gap with the US they are still way behind the US when it comes to projecting military strength globally. The US military also has the operational, training, logistics required to support military forces deployed abroad. China has driven it's aircraft carrier in circles a few times.

      The US is never going to invade China or Russia unless they do something that really pisses off the US public. Although there are probably more than a few US citizens who would just love a shoot at the invaders. The only group possibly more powerful than the US military is the very well armed US citizenry. I'm surprised someone hasn't started offering international terrorist hunting and excursion packages to big game hunters. For a little extra they could offer taxidermy services for the successful hunters.

      Bush could have never deployed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq without the tacit support of a large majority of US citizens. After 9/11 the US public wanted blood, mayhem, and destruction reigned down on any country who had the nerve to celebrate thousands of US citizens being killed.
      China's economic strength is assessed using figures supplied by the Chinese government. To say they "cook the books" before they release their economic data would be a gigantic understatement. And GDP are not an accurate measuring stick between two economies. While still a rough generalization the per-capita figures are more telling because China is not even in the top 10.

      There is really no need for animosity between the US and China. China is one of the few countries the US has never invaded. Before WW2 the US and China had a good relationship. One of Roosevelt's key demands before he would lift the oil and steel embargo against Japan was for Japan to leave China. Of course everyone knows what happened next. It was Nixon's visit to China on 1972 that started China's conversion from a non-functional isolated communist state to a state today that is communist in name only. It is one of the US's most successful regime changes in history. The US loves new business partners.

    6. Re: Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, no Intel equipment here. The IBM Power9s are made in New York but are mainly there to choreograph operations of the workhorse NVIDIA processors which have more than double the transistor count.

    7. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why do you insist on rating a country's technological prowess based on its military? North Korea does that while their people starve. Is North Korea your role model?

      China and Russia spend just enough in that arena to keep the US wasting its money. China's war with the US is being won on the education, economic and manufacturing fronts. They really don't care about us running around screaming how big our dick is.

    8. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you keep telling yourself that, does it become true at some point? How much of that "supercomputer" arrived vai sea container?

      isnt the supercomputer rush just an old school pissing match? someone spends a ton of money and builds one, only for it to be replaced in a years time?

      when china builds a faster one nexst year, will you post "GO china go"? didnt this US one replace a chinese computer?

    9. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      typical american post.. military, look how great our milityary is..

      havent had a balanced budget in how long? but you sure have a great military.

        Despite all the hype about China's military closing the gap with the US they are still way behind the US when it comes to projecting military strength globally.

      why is this the bar you measure to? over china's 3000 year history when they were the words superpower, they still did not "project military power".

      your metrics seem way off.. your roads are crumbling, along with the rest of your infrastructure while china is building new high speed trains.

    10. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by dk20 · · Score: 1

      odd.. because your illiteracy rate hasnt changed in 10 years, and is higher then china's with their "primitive chicken scratch"

      https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

      Care to explain that one for us?

    11. Re:Go team USA. Suck it China. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Meanwhile they build all your electronics, because you don't know how to, and 25% of your scientifical output is by Chinese on H1B visas, because Americans don't know how to :---)

  15. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pron.

  16. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

    I'd rent it out. Sell processing time on it. How else would one pay the power bills? You can rent a lot of processing power on Amazon, but you can't rent a supercomputer-grade high performance interconnect between your nodes. Not from them, anyway.

    I'd offer a special service for non-profit customers: They can pay power costs only, but then they only get to use idle resources. Commercial-rate customers take priority - got to pay the bills somehow.

  17. no anticipation (making you wait) secret sauce by epine · · Score: 1

    How is this any different than a data center of the same scale? I'm not even sure it has a higher bisection bandwidth.

    Okay—I am sure it will have way lower latency between nodes at any equivalent bandwidth tier. But unless you're planning to aggressively exploit that, it's just your garden variety datacenter make more expensive and less flexible.

    1977 Heinz Ketchup Commercial "Anticipation"

    Heck of a lot of money, Brownie, for less ketchup.

    1. Re:no anticipation (making you wait) secret sauce by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      How is this any different than a data center of the same scale?

      High speed interconnects, and much more computing power, mostly in the GPUs that many headless data center servers don't even have.

      I am sure it will have way lower latency between nodes at any equivalent bandwidth tier.

      Duh.

      But unless you're planning to aggressively exploit that ...

      There are plenty of critical applications that benefit from fast interconnects.

  18. MMO? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What kind of massive multiplayer game could you facilitate on these?

    300,000 person FPS to replicate Normandy landing in WW2? Landing craft, infantry, planes, intense physics and all?

    1. Re:MMO? by jmccue · · Score: 1

      A giant nethack dungeon with thousands of players playing at the same time fighting each other!

  19. Beowulf cluster by Locutus · · Score: 1

    How about making a Beowulf cluster of those? Oh, what a minute. ;-/

    LoB

    --
    "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
  20. I have a supercomputer by iamhassi · · Score: 2

    My Intel desktop has the performance of a 90's supercomputer. Strange to think the best technology available to the world's top scientists in the 90’s now sits on my desk

    --
    my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    1. Re:I have a supercomputer by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Well yeah, GPUs are pushing into the 100+ TFLOP ranges these days.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    2. Re:I have a supercomputer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You do have better technology on your desk than a 76 racks of Pentium Pro processors burning 850kWs of power. A few times over even. Not to mentioning the software. And it all fits in a single PCIe card today.

  21. Re:First by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    With the possible exception of some recent developments by China, all supercomputers use CPUs made by Intel and AMD. American companies.

    Essentially, ALL supercomputers are American. All these other countries are just buying American designed components and putting them together.

  22. The Real Story: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "The reason our super computer exists and is so successful is because of me," Trump told reporters, "great confidence in the moves that my Administration is making".
    "The Fake News Media barely mentions the fact I made this Super Computer and America just hit another New Record and that business in the U.S. is booming...but the people know!" he tweeted. "Can you imagine if 'O' was president and had this computer — would be biggest story on earth! Slashdot would be on fire!"

    He also commented on Apple and Linux users:
    "We're rounding 'em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they're going to be happy because they want to run Windows. And, by the way, I know it doesn't sound nice. But not everything is nice."

    1. Re: The Real Story: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bullshit.
      Everyone knows Al Gore invented the internet, and global warming.

  23. It doesn't compute by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Titan was ~27K TFlop/s peak and ~17K TFlop/s max at Nov/2017. 27*5 is not 200 PFlop/s...

  24. Linpack is only one measure by u19925 · · Score: 1

    The supercomputers are measured using Linpack. This is a simple benchmark and can be done efficiently by large number of dumb cores in parallel. Though some workloads mimic Linpack, most workloads don't, so Linpack is not a good measure of supercomputer speed. Another benchmark which is gaining momentum nowadays is HPCG (see http://www.hpcg-benchmark.org/ ) which measures more broader performance and it shows quite a bit different picture. The top is still the 2011 K Computer. Some NEC computers which don't make in top500 are ranked in thirties. The Chinese computer is current top500 leader but it is ranked 5th on HPCG, even behind their own other computer which is 1/3rd the speed on Linpack.

  25. In all likelihood... by TeknoHog · · Score: 2

    ..the fastest supercomputer is running a Finnish-born OS. So I don't care about the nationality of whoever assembled the machine, Finland wins anyway ;)

    BTW, a fun detail from the article that should really have been included in the summary:

    James Hack, director of ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    1. Re:In all likelihood... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A Finnish OS written in an American programming language and based on an American OS.

  26. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

    You can rent a lot of processing power on Amazon, but you can't rent a supercomputer-grade high performance interconnect between your nodes. Not from them, anyway.

    https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/

  27. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

    Ssshhhiiiiittttt. Don't put it past the Gov to pull a stunt like that.

    Step 1. Print money via the Treasury in addition to spending tax payer money.
    Step 2. Build supercomputer
    Step 3. Mine Crypto Currency (Bitcoin)
    Step 4. Sell said Crypto Currency.
    Step 5. Recycle the money back into the Gov.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  28. US = shithole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    America needs all this computing power to process all the data they collect on their citizens and citizens of other countries.

  29. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by Shinobi · · Score: 1

    The bandwidth in Amazon's HPC nodes is sort of ok compared to some cluster configurations, but the latency still leaves a fair bit to be desired. Last I tested, 6 months ago, the AWS HPC networking still had a 6 times higher latency on real world tasks I tested it with, compared to Infiniband equipped nodes(depending on the node hardware in question, GPU's might even talk over Infiniband to another GPU inside the node, if it's on another PCIe root complex, because it's faster, and I didn't receive an answer to that question from Amazon when I asked)

  30. Yeah but can it run Crysis at 16K HD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    probably

  31. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Rent it to the IRS and DoJ.
    Ensure every cyber currency in the USA was interacted with using the big gov super computer.
    When the cyber criminals want to cash out their digital currency collection, the US gov is ready to help with that transaction.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  32. *BSD's death and legacy [*sigh] by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I went out to *BSD's grave on Decoration Day, out at the old forgotten cemetery by the dark woods beyond the edge of town. There within olfactory distance of the municipal treatment plant you will find *BSD final resting place.

    *BSD's tombstone was overgrown with weeds and moss so I pulled the tangled mess off the marker and cleaned it up the best I could. My melancholy thoughts pondered that this indeed was *BSDs figurative charnel house of which so many have spoken

    Nothing is so sad as an untended grave, a loved one now forgotten. The short sad life of a doomed and fated OS makes us realize there but for the grace of God go all of us.

    I planted some marigolds that I had found discarded behind Bud's Garden Center. Hopefully they will bring a modicum of cheer to that God forsaken plot. I only hope that the torpid colored boy who carelessly mows the cemetery doesn't slice them down, and in so doing, mirror *BSD own fate against deaths irresistible scythe.

    Funny how things work out. Linux now runs the world's fastest computers, while *BSD lies moldering within its forgotten grave. Let the barren silence of *BSD's tomb be a mute reminder that hubris and braggadocio were no match when the Angel of Death's bleak umbra fell upon *BSD.

  33. Re:First by RhettLivingston · · Score: 1

    ? You don't seem to be the only one with this misconception. I see several posts below that echo you. Note that this supercomputer temporarily replaces a Chinese supercomputer at the top of the list that did not use American processors. So, prior to this one, the world leading supercomputer did not use American processors.

    Furthermore, this one is not an Intel or AMD machine. Still American companies, but each node in this one has 2 IBM Power9s and 6 NVIDIA V100 Voltas. In fact, the GPUs are the real compute power in most of the really big supercomputers these days and lots of them run NVIDIA GPUs.

    The Power9s appear to be made in Malta, NY, but the NVIDIA V100s, arguably the real compute power, are made by TSMC in Taiwan. This machine might be designed in America, but it appears to be mostly made in Taiwan.

    These processors are made to work together. The Power9 has native support for the NVIDIA's NVLink connections. The Power9's 16GB of HBM2 memory maintains cache coherency with the Voltas, essentially acting as an L3 cache for the Voltas.

    The core count in this system is mind-blowing. The Power9s are apparently the version with 24 cores each. So 24*2*4600 = 220,800 SMT4 cores. The Voltas are hard to quantify. Each Volta has 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). By that count, there are 84*6*4600 = 2,318,400 SMs. This is where the real supercomputing occurs. But each SM in turn contains 64 FP32 cores, 64 INT32 cores, 32 FP64 cores, 8 Tensor Cores, and 4 texture units. I'm not going to even bother doing the math. Suffice it to say that this machine has already broken the exaflop barrier in problems that didn't require FP64 precision.

    The transistor count is also astounding. The Voltas have 21.1 billion transistors each. The Power9s have 8 billion. ((21.1*6)+(8*2)) * 4600 = 655.96 trillion transistors just in terms of processors. We've come a long way since the Intel 4004's 2300 transistors less than 50 years ago.

  34. IBM POWER and PowerPC get short shrift by kriston · · Score: 2

    IBM POWER and PowerPC get short shrift.

    We can only imagine how many fewer datacenters we'd have if these pure RISC implementations with superior multiprocessing capability were used instead of x86-64 emulating crusty old instruction sets.

    --

    Kriston

  35. Re:Clever hiding NSA hardware at Energy by kriston · · Score: 1

    Azure is competing in this space along with AWS.

    I am shocked that these firms don't yet offer to bill by CPU usage. I come from the end of the age when CPU cycles were charged per contract and were planned using budgets. It wasn't for rationing but to help pay for the resources.

    --

    Kriston

  36. Re: First by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I saw an article that said the nVidia GPUs were V100 Tesla's, not Voltas.

  37. Re: First by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who cares if all the companies are in the US?

    Every single one of them manufacture their products in China

  38. Re: First by RhettLivingston · · Score: 1

    No, the Power9 is fabbed in New York.

  39. So, is America great again yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It is, isn't it?

  40. Re:First by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not that it makes much difference (or that it makes it more of a word), but; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wideband

    First used in 1931.

  41. question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Crysis framerate?

  42. Also, Fastest & Largest AI Supercomputer by gupg · · Score: 1

    The story has focused so far on how the US got the #1 crown back. But the real story is about how we can now run the fastest and largest AI jobs. Because this IBM supercomputer has 27K+ GPUs, it can run massive deep learning jobs. IBM has been very focused on this deep learning space with their TensorFlow-based open-source PowerAI software offering.

  43. Uh, What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That is not "superscalar". That is "modular". A different word with a different meaning.

  44. Yes.. if you dig into the system guide... by gosand · · Score: 1

    it states it is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.4. System User Guide - Overview - OS

    --

    My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.