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Summit supercomputer is about to retire
Summit supercomputer is about to retire
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced that Summit, the world's most powerful supercomputer in 2018 and 2019, will be shut down in November after nearly six years of operation.
Summit consists of 4,356 nodes, each equipped with two 22-core 3.07 GHz IBM Power9 CPUs and six Nvidia Tesla GV100 GPUs. In its six years of operation, the supercomputer has provided 200 million hours of research simulations.
Summit Supercomputer.
In 2020, Summit was surpassed by Japan's Fugaku supercomputer. Fugaku, developed jointly by Fujitsu and the Riken Research Institute, achieved a computing speed of 442 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second).
Summit has remained on the Top500 list of the world's 10 most powerful supercomputers for six years. But ORNL believes that the computing power of this supercomputer is no longer suitable for its purposes.
Summit currently has a computing power of 200.79 petaflops (200.79 quadrillion calculations per second), which cannot be compared to Frontier using AMD CPUs - the world's most powerful supercomputer to date with 1,714.81 petaflops. Frontier was also developed by ORNL.
Frontier offers eight times the performance while consuming twice the amount of power (22,786 kW) that Summit needs (10,096 kW).
According to Tom's Hardware, the top priority of supercomputer operations centers today is to develop a system that consumes less power while performing better.