ORNL’s Summit keeps fastest computer title

The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory retains the title of world’s fastest and most powerful, even as ORNL waits for the next-generation Frontier machine to come online in 2021.

Summit remains on top for the fourth consecutive ranking of the world’s 500 fastest computers, done every six months for 26 years. The TOP500 list is compiled by four authors, including Jack Dongarra, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee.

This time, unusually, all of the top 10 computers ranked in the same order as six months ago, according to a TOP500 news release. In second place is Summit’s sibling, the Sierra supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

China holds third and fourth places with its Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi and Tianhe-2A supercomputer in Guangzhou.

The remaining spots in the top 10 are held by three more American machines, one Swiss, one Japanese and one German.

Summit’s speed topped out at 148.8 petaflops, or 148.8 quadrillion calculations per second, slightly better than its record-setting performance six months ago, according to the news release. That’s half again as fast as Sierra at 94.6 petaflops. TaihuLight came in at 93 petaflops.

On the overall list, China now holds 45.4% of the slots, while U.S. computers are only 23.6% of the total; though overall U.S. machines tend to be larger, according to TOP500.

Three successive systems at Oak Ridge — Jaguar, Titan and Summit — have been dubbed the world’s fastest since 2010.

In August, ORNL began dismantling Titan — the world’s fastest computer when it came online in 2012 – to make room for Frontier.

Source: Knoxville News Sentinel

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Published November 22, 2019