IBM Supercomputer: Summit Rivals China TaihuLight; IBM Power9, NVidia Volta GPUS, HBM + DDR4 Memory Come 2018

The Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory is looking forward to delivering a new IBM system, Summit, in 2018 that would be capable of 200 peak petaflops. After the announcement of China holding the world title with the fastest supercomputer TaihuLight, United States is seeking for answers.

Intel's Summit will use IBM Power9 and NVidia Volta GPUS. Summit has 3,400 nodes with each node delivering over half a terabyte of HBM + DDR4 memory.  Also, 800 GB of non-volatile RAM is included to potentially serve as a burst buffer or extended memory.

A programmed 150-petaflop IBM system Sierra will also be kept at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is scheduled to run in the middle of 2018. Another supercomputer created by Cray and Intel called Aurora, is due by the end of 2018 and will be located at the Argonne National Laboratory.

DOE released a statement via Computerworld and pointed out that since 1993, the supercomputing capacity of the US have grown exponentially by 300,000 and continues to remain as an integrated priority of the department.

Sunway's TaihuLight is estimated to reach a peak speed of 124.5 petaflops and has recently achieved 93 petaflops according to the Linpack benchmark. For the first time in history, the TaihuLight does not use US parts as a source, but it is powered by Sunway 260 core SW26010 processors. The processors are made in China and does not use US sources due to a ban Intel imposed of China's top four supercomputer centers, Futurism reported.

As China was hailed to have the fastest supercomputer, it may not really mean as much because hardware speed, capability, and software package are crucial metrics. It has also been stated that the strength of U.S. Programs does not just rely on hardware capabilities, but also in the ability of software developers that captures high-performance computing used in science and industrial aspects.

Most supercomputers used for various researchers are held at DOE. They plan on releasing two important supercomputers by 2018, Computer World reported.