Summit (supercomputer)

Summit (supercomputer)
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Name	Summit
Caption	The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Location	Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, United States
Organization	United States Department of Energy
Manufacturer	IBM
Purpose	Scientific research
Active	2018–present
Cost	$200 million
Power	13 MW
Operating system	Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Speed	200 petaFLOPS (peak)
Memory	2.8 PB
Storage	250 PB
Web	[https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/summit/ OLCF Summit page]

Summit (supercomputer). Summit is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. It was the world's fastest supercomputer from its launch in June 2018 until being surpassed by Fugaku in June 2020. As a leadership-class computing facility, it is dedicated to open scientific research in fields such as astrophysics, materials science, and climate modeling.

Overview

Summit is housed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a United States Department of Energy (DOE) user facility located within Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system was designed as part of the DOE's CORAL initiative, a collaboration between IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox Technologies. Its primary mission is to accelerate discovery in energy, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence, supporting projects from institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The supercomputer represents a significant national investment in maintaining United States competitiveness in high-performance computing.

Hardware and architecture

Summit's architecture is based on IBM's POWER9 microprocessor and NVIDIA Volta GPUs, connected by a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand network. Each of its approximately 4,600 nodes contains two POWER9 CPUs and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, providing a hybrid CPU/GPU design optimized for both traditional computational science and machine learning workloads. The system incorporates over 10 petabytes of DDR4 memory and utilizes a IBM Spectrum Scale parallel file system for its massive 250-petabyte storage capacity. This design enables efficient data movement and complex simulation workflows.

Software and applications

The system runs a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and supports a wide array of scientific software and programming models. Key applications include the QCD-based MILC code for particle physics, the Denovo application for nuclear reactor simulation, and the LAMMPS molecular dynamics package. Summit is also extensively used for AI research, running frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch for projects in healthcare such as cancer research and COVID-19 drug discovery. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility provides user support and development tools to optimize codes for its unique architecture.

Performance and rankings

At its deployment, Summit achieved a peak performance of 200 petaFLOPS and a LINPACK benchmark score of 148.6 petaFLOPS, securing the number one position on the TOP500 list in June 2018. It also claimed top spots on the HPCG and HPL-AI benchmarks, demonstrating balanced performance for real-world scientific applications. It held the title of world's fastest supercomputer for two years until being overtaken by Japan's Fugaku system. As of recent lists, Summit remains among the most powerful systems globally and continues to deliver high throughput for the DOE's research portfolio.

History and development

The development of Summit was initiated under the CORAL contract awarded by the United States Department of Energy in 2014, with the goal of delivering an exascale-capable precursor system. Construction by IBM began in 2017 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory site, a location with a long history in supercomputing including previous systems like Titan. Summit was officially unveiled to the public in June 2018. Its successor, the Frontier system, also deployed at OLCF, became operational in 2022, continuing the laboratory's legacy at the forefront of high-performance computing.

Category:Supercomputers Category:Oak Ridge National Laboratory Category:IBM