USA will retake supercomputer crown with the Oak Ridge Summit

[HEXUS]

200 petaflop Summit computer is powered by 9,216 IBM CPUs and 27,648 Nvidia GPUs.

Read more.

[DanceswithUnix]

I make that 110592 HBM chips, might explain the rumoured HBM memory shortage

[3dcandy]

Will it play Crysis?

[shaithis]

Department of Energy......27,648 Nvidia GPUs....hmmm looks like they are serious about crypto currency lol

[DanceswithUnix]

Will it play Crysis?

Depends how well it's neural net is trained, though I'm not sure I want to train the world's most powerful supercomputer to play combat games as an AI

[lumireleon]

IBM? isn't that a dead CPU architecture?

[lumireleon]

...another issue... (SHORTCUTS) mostly G.P.U based teraflops and not C.P.U based. Just having a few v100 and comparing that to a Chinese supercomputer that uses real CPUs to archive the Tflops, which is 'real' better?

[DanceswithUnix]

IBM? isn't that a dead CPU architecture?

Power is arguably the best CPU architecture currently available for large systems, certainly the best supported (IBM can be pretty awesome if you are a big enough customer).

...another issue... (SHORTCUTS) mostly G.P.U based teraflops and not C.P.U based. Just having a few v100 and comparing that to a Chinese supercomputer that uses real CPUs to archive the Tflops, which is 'real' better?

Depends on what you are trying to solve. If GPUs didn't deliver results, these people wouldn't have spent millions on them.

Edit: ... these aren't really GPUs either, more computation units based on GPU technology.

[scaryjim]

Power is arguably the best CPU architecture currently available for large systems, certainly the best supported

...

Edit: ... these aren't really GPUs either, more computation units based on GPU technology.

Worth also noting that the Chinese supercomputer it'll theoretically replace at the top of the pile doesn't use what most people would recognise as "real" CPUs either - it uses a custom RISC architecture (rumoured to be DEC Alpha inspired or derived) in which each CPU consists of many lightweight computation cores and a small number of more fully featured management cores.

Traditional x86 CPUs simply aren't a good fit for the vast majority of "supercomputing" workloads, and tbh the instruction set as a whole doesn't lend itself well to the field - as Intel found out...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Will this have more processing power than a Moose??

[Iota]

Summit ended up being an AI behemoth

As long as they don't rename it skynet, we're all good.

[Myss_tree]

As long as they don't rename it skynet, we're all good.

Am sure its name is HAL 9000

[stevie lee]

cant wait for AMDs EPIC response and for it to be cooled by one of those usb desktop fans.*


more seriously. remember back in the 60s when a computer was the size of a house? this computers the size of a house. so will this be a standard PC in 30 years?



*(reference to that 28core intel air-con unit cooler and amds 32core just using a standard cooler)

[DanceswithUnix]

more seriously. remember back in the 60s when a computer was the size of a house? this computers the size of a house. so will this be a standard PC in 30 years?

That involved shrinking switching elements from valves a couple of cm across to fets maybe 50nm across. From the current 14nm feature processes that would try and make transistors the size of an electron, which seems unlikely.

Perhaps we will get better at cooling and stacking that we can manage to get chips better than a 1U rack spacing apart vertically. Who knows, hopefully I will still be around then.

[mtyson]

Summit video from Nvidia, perhaps worth a look: