US Department Of Energy To Deploy Two Flagship Supercomputers In 2017

The US Department of Energy has today announced its plans to deploy two supercomputers in 2017 that will deliver at least three-times the performance of today’s most powerful competitor. Like Oak Ridge’s TITAN, which was put into use a couple of years ago, these new supercomputers will make use of NVIDIA’s Tesla accelerators, but unlike TITAN, IBM’s POWER processors will be used rather than AMD’s Opteron.

One of the supercomputers, called Sierra, will be installed at Lawrence Livermore in California, while the other, Summit, will call Oak Ridge in Tennessee its home – that’s right, TITAN’s getting a sibling.

And speaking of TITAN, the video below highlights a neat fact: Summit could prove 5 – 10 times faster than TITAN in certain tasks, and according to an NVIDIA press release, it’ll use just 10 percent more power.

Both Sierra and Summit look to be the first supercomputers to make use of NVIDIA’s NVLink technology, which we first learned about at the company’s GPU Technology Conference earlier this year. With it, data can be shared between the CPUs and GPUs at up to 5 – 12 times faster, something incredibly important in our quest for exascale computing. In describing NVLink, NVIDIA’s Sumit Gupta makes a great analogy:

“NVLink, the world’s first high-speed GPU interconnect, offers a faster alternative. NVLink will let data move between GPUs and CPUs five to 12 times faster than they can today. Imagine what would happen to highway congestion in Los Angeles if the roads expanded from 4 lanes to 20.”

Unfortunately, there are no previews of what these supercomputers will ultimately look like, but given they’re infused with NVIDIA hardware, I’m sure we’ll be treated to a lot of eye candy at their launch, as we were with TITAN.