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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.
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!
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
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.
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
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
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.
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