The new computer has been named Summit and it boasts a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second (equivalent to 200 petaflops). This means the supercomputer is eight times more powerful than any previously assessed system. The previous record holder in supercomputer stakes was a device called Titan.
Further with the computing power, with some applications Summit has the capacity to perform in excess of three billion-billion mixed-precision calculations per second. This means it will be suitable for advanced and complex areas of scientific inquiry, such as research into energy, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence.
This enables scientists to use techniques such as machine learning and deep learning to help to solve conundrums relating to human health, advanced physics (such as high-energy equations), new materials discovery, and many other areas.
Commenting on the unveiling of the supercomputer, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry stated: “Today’s launch of the Summit supercomputer demonstrates the strength of American leadership in scientific innovation and technology development… It’s going to have a profound impact in energy research, scientific discovery, economic competitiveness and national security.”
Summit, which is based on IBM AC922 technology, is linked to 4,608 computer servers, each of which is formed of two 22-core IBM Power9 processors plus six Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators. These are interconnected with a dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100-Gb/s InfiniBand. The system boasts over 10 petabytes of memory paired designed for effective and efficient data movement.
The intention is for Summit to align with the White House Artificial Intelligence for America initiative, which was announced in May 2018. This is a policy platform to look into the types of “policies we will need to realize that promise for the American people and maintain U.S. leadership in the age of artificial intelligence.”
In related news, DeepBrain Chain, which operates an artificial intelligence based computing platform powered by blockchain, has entered into a partnership with SingularityNET (who are full stack open source platform for innovators in artificial intelligence).
With the partnership, DeepBrain Chain will develop a platform for the training of artificial intelligence models using an integrated artificial intelligence cloud network and SingularityNET will work on the autonomous interaction between artificial intelligence agents.
