Monday, June 25th 2018
With Summit, US Regains Leadership from China in TOP500 Supercomputers Listing
We previously covered in more depth the fact that the US was gearing up to overtake China's Sunway TaihuLight, then the world's fastest supercomputer, with its Summit machine, built in collaboration between IBM (with its water-cooled Power Systems AC922 nodes with 24-core processors and 96 processing threads) and NVIDIA (GV100 GPUs).
Now, this US dream has finally come to pass, and in a big way - the Summit delivers more than double the performance of China's posterchild, coming in at 200 PetaFLOPs of computing power. Summit boasts of 27,648 Volta Tensor Core GPUs and 9,216 CPUs within its 5,600 square feet. The Summit supercomputer consumes 15 MW of power (the site where it's deployed is able to deliver up to 20 MW), which is on-par with China's Sunway - but remember, it more than doubles the peak PetaFlops from 93 to 200. A good step in the battle for supercomputer supremacy, but China still has an increasing foothold in the number of systems it has employed and registered with the TOP500.
Sources:
TOP 500, NVIDIA Blogs
Now, this US dream has finally come to pass, and in a big way - the Summit delivers more than double the performance of China's posterchild, coming in at 200 PetaFLOPs of computing power. Summit boasts of 27,648 Volta Tensor Core GPUs and 9,216 CPUs within its 5,600 square feet. The Summit supercomputer consumes 15 MW of power (the site where it's deployed is able to deliver up to 20 MW), which is on-par with China's Sunway - but remember, it more than doubles the peak PetaFlops from 93 to 200. A good step in the battle for supercomputer supremacy, but China still has an increasing foothold in the number of systems it has employed and registered with the TOP500.
27 Comments on With Summit, US Regains Leadership from China in TOP500 Supercomputers Listing
But yeah had to say that it's not quite 200PFlops, Peak on the list is 187.7PFlops and Rmax 122.3PFlops.
I seriously, cannot figure some people out.It's used (I think) like most other - time can be booked out at cost and it runs huge research projects, machine learning and AI especially.
The US government mainly uses the Titan (and now the Summit) for simulating nuclear decay in stockpiled nuclear weapons and the decay of used fuel from reactors.
Probably also Signal Intelligence and Cryptogrophy work, but that kind of stuff is clandestine and typically not openly acknowledged.Hmmm, I can't imagine why a computer hardware news and review site would have a story about the newest and most powerful supercomputer in the world. :rolleyes:
sorry, but no single chip could possibly use 25 Megawatts (or, more power than both the Titan and Summit supercomputers combined). If you put 25 megawatts through a single microchip (let's say 1 square inch in size), no amount of cooling in the world could prevent that from being instantly vaporized.
Encryption, like most security, is really only meant to keep the average bad guy out. Just like dead bolt locks, they keep the average person out of your business. If a real bad guy were to be interested in you and your data, well... this XKCD comic will explain things.
Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets. (Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5.)
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