Mellanox Accelerates Summit, World Fastest HPC and AI Supercomputer

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its EDR IB accelerates the new world fastest HPC and AI system, named Summit, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, based on the June’18 TOP500 supercomputers list.

Summit is capable of 200 petaflop performance and leverages dual EDR IB network to provide overall 200Gb/s throughput to each compute server.

Summit provides eight times higher performance versus the previous fastest supercomputer in the US. The supercomputer will enable simulations of greater resolution and higher fidelity to advance human knowledge in diverse science domains such as biology, nuclear science, cosmology and more. Some early Summit research projects include studying exploding stars at unprecedented scales, simulating particle turbulence in sustainable fusion reactions, researching materials for high-temperature superconductors and others.

Summit is also the fastest AI platform in the world, offering opportunities for the integration of AI and scientific discovery. Applying machine learning and deep learning capabilities to automate, accelerate, and drive understanding at supercomputer scales will help scientists achieve breakthroughs in human health, energy and engineering, and answer fundamental questions about the universe.

“We are proud to accelerate the world’s fastest HPC and AI supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a result of a great collaboration over the last few years between Oak Ridge National Laboratory, IBM, NVIDIA and us,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO, Mellanox. “Our IB smart accelerations and offload technology delivers highest HPC and AI applications performance, scalability, and robustness. IB enables organizations to maximize their data center return-on-investment and improve their TCO and, as such, it connects many of the top HPC and AI infrastructures around the world. We look forward to being a part of and accelerating new scientific discoveries and advances in AI development, to be performed and enabled by Summit.“

The need to analyze growing amounts of data, to support complex simulations, to overcome performance bottlenecks and to create intelligent data algorithms requires the ability to manage and carry out computational operations on the data as it is being transferred by the data center interconnect. IB solutions incorporate the In-Network Computing technology that performs data algorithms within the network, delivering performance and scalability advantages, and enabling the era of ‘data-centric’ data centers.

“Summit HPC and AI-optimized infrastructure enables us to analyze massive amounts of data to better understand world phenomena, to enable new discoveries and to create advanced AI software,” said Buddy Bland, program director, Oak Ridge leadership computing faculty. “IB In-Network Computing technology is a critical new technology that helps Summit achieve our scientific and research goals. We are excited to see the fruits of our collaboration with Mellanox over the last several years through the development of the In-Network Computing technology, and look forward to take advantage of it for achieving highest performance and efficiency for our applications.“

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the US. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.