IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced that it is debuting the world’s fastest supercomputer in the world in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
The PC maker and the agency today unveiled Summit, which is the newest supercomputer from the DoE. IBM says that Summit is currently the world’s “most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer,” churning out a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second.
If that performance level is accurate, it would put Summit at the top of the Top 500 supercomputer ranking when the new list is published later this month. The move would also mark the first time since 2012 that a U.S.-based supercomputer holds the top spot on that list.
The IBM computer has been in the works for several years and it includes 4,608 compute servers with two 22-core IBM Power9 chips and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs each. All in all, Summit’s system has over 10 petabytes of memory.
Because of Nvidia’s GPUs, it makes sense that the computer’s system will be used for machine learning and deep learning applications. It will also be used for the usual high performance computing workloads for research in energy and advanced materials.
“Summit’s AI-optimized hardware also gives researchers an incredible platform for analyzing massive datasets and creating intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery,” said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences, in today’s announcement.
IBM stock gained 0.4% on Friday.
