U.S. to Build Two Flagship Supercomputers for National Labs

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 14, 2014) - The U.S. Department of Energy today unveiled plans to build two GPU-accelerated supercomputers -- expected to deliver at least three-times greater performance than today's most powerful system -- which will move the world closer to the long-held goal of exascale computing.

The supercomputers, to be installed in 2017, will be based on next-generation IBM POWER servers with NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU accelerators and NVIDIA NVLink™ high-speed GPU interconnect technology.

The "Summit" system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be capable of delivering 150 to 300 peak petaflops, and be used for open science. Delivering performance well in excess of 100 peak petaflops, the "Sierra" system will be a key element of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's national nuclear security mission.

They will be considerably faster than the U.S.'s current speed champ, Oak Ridge's "Titan," which delivers 27 peak petaflops, as well as the world's fastest, Tianhe-2 at China's National Super Computer Center, in Guangzhou, which delivers 55 peak petaflops.

Visit the NVIDIA website for more information and a video about these new systems.

"Today's science is tomorrow's technology," said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA. "Scientists are tackling massive challenges from quantum to global to galactic scales. Their work relies on increasingly more powerful supercomputers. Through the invention of GPU acceleration, we have paved the path to exascale supercomputing -- giving scientists a tool for unimaginable discoveries."

The U.S. is investing in Summit and Sierra to achieve breakthroughs that lead to greater U.S. energy independence, new approaches to curbing climate change, dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency, natural disaster prediction, safer nuclear material storage, economic competitiveness, and more.

The systems represent the first major milestone in the ongoing partnership between IBM and NVIDIA. They build upon the work of the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community formed to develop next-generation computing solutions for high performance computing and enterprise data center customers.

New Technologies Hasten Exascale Computing
The supercomputing community has for many years worked toward building exascale systems, which can perform a quintillion -- a billion billion or 10¹⁸ -- floating point calculations per second, known as FLOPS. A FLOP is equivalent to a single mathematical calculation, like multiplying two numbers together.