iTnews

US claims exascale compute record

By Juha Saarinen on Jun 10, 2018 5:06PM
US claims exascale compute record

New supercomputer hits 1.88 exaflops with GPUs.

A new supercomputer at the United States Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has broken the exascale computing barrier by taking a non-traditional approach to enhancing performance.

ORNL said it achieved a peak throughput of 1.88 exaops while analysing genomic data - faster than any previously reported science application.

That is equivalent to nearly 2 billion billion calculations per second, ORNL said.

The hardware in question was the Summit supercomputer, which is built around an IBM AC922 system with 4608 nodes, each equipped with six NVIDIA Volta graphics processing units, for a total of 27,648 video cards, and 1600 gigabytes of memory per node.

Summit uses 9216 IBM Power9 CPUs with the NVLink high-bandwidth connections built in, and has a total of ten petabytes of DDR-4 and stacked, 3D HBM2 system memory.

Storage is 250 petabytes in size. Summit runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The supercomputer draws 13 megawatts of power and is able to offer 200 peta floating point operations per second (petaflops) application performance.

That performance metric would see Summit take first place in the TOP500 spot, beating out China's Sunway TaihuLight system that has been benchmarked at 93 petaflops. 

To breach the exascale barrier, ORNL used a mix of numerical precisons.

Scientific computing uses double-precision floating point operations that normally rely on 64 bits in computer memory.

In the record breaking event, ORNL researchers went with high speed single (32-bit) and half-precision (16-bit) operations to speed things up.

Furthermore, ORNL modified the Combinatorial Metrics comparative genomics application to use the Tensor core matrix multiplication capabilities that NVIDIA has added to its Volta GPUs.

Using the Tensor cores alone provided a four-and-a-half fold application speed increase, ORNL said. 

WIth all the optimisations in place, Summit achieved a 25-fold code speed increase compared to ORNL's previous supercomputer Titan.

Apart from analysing large datasets comprising millions of genomes to compare variations present in the same genes in a given population - a task that, given its size, was impossible to do before - Summit will be aimed at solving several other scientific problems in various areas.

These include biological systems, virtual fusion reactor models, fluid dynamics, astrophysics, artificial intelligence and deep learning, and materials properties with quantum mechanics.

Got a news tip for our journalists? Share it with us anonymously here.
Copyright © iTnews.com.au . All rights reserved.
Tags:
department of energy exascale gpu hardware ibm nvidia oak ridge national laboratory supercomputing tensorflow

Partner Content

Resetting cyber security for the new threat landscape
Partner Content Resetting cyber security for the new threat landscape
Tackling cybersecurity in 2021
Partner Content Tackling cybersecurity in 2021
What is zero trust cybersecurity?
Partner Content What is zero trust cybersecurity?
Beat the DDoS blackmails in 2021
Promoted Content Beat the DDoS blackmails in 2021

Sponsored Whitepapers

The top 5 tech trends to deliver business outcomes
The top 5 tech trends to deliver business outcomes
10 reasons why businesses need to invest in cloud security training
10 reasons why businesses need to invest in cloud security training
Your guide to application security solutions
Your guide to application security solutions
State of Software Security: Open Source Edition
State of Software Security: Open Source Edition
Five questions to ask before you upgrade to a SIEM solution
Five questions to ask before you upgrade to a SIEM solution

Events

  • On-Demand Webinar: How Poly and Microsoft are Embracing Future Work Environments
  • [iTnews and Micro Focus] Navigating the cloud modernisation minefield
By Juha Saarinen
Jun 10 2018
5:06PM
0 Comments

Related Articles

  • IBM names head of new IT infrastructure services company
  • UK competition watchdog to probe Nvidia's Arm takeover
  • Intel's Habana starts to chip away at Nvidia in cloud
  • Nvidia shares dip on predicted decline in data centre chip sales
Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Share on Whatsapp Email A Friend

Most Read Articles

Infosys scores another $40m for Centrelink payments engine build

Infosys scores another $40m for Centrelink payments engine build

Aussie Broadband switches mobile allegiance from Telstra to Optus

Aussie Broadband switches mobile allegiance from Telstra to Optus

Aussie Broadband brings in NBN users chasing a better experience

Aussie Broadband brings in NBN users chasing a better experience

Bosch, Microsoft join forces to develop vehicle software platform

Bosch, Microsoft join forces to develop vehicle software platform

You must be a registered member of iTnews to post a comment.
Log In | Register
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in any form without prior authorisation.
Your use of this website constitutes acceptance of nextmedia's Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.