World’s most powerful supercomputer, first exaop AI system, uses 27,648 NVIDIA GPUs to let top scientists race ahead. The Summit - which made its debut Friday at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory - is flat-out fast. Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

Santa Clara, CA, USA - June 08, 2018

By Ian Buck
Vice President of NVIDIA's Accelerated Computing business unit


• World’s most powerful supercomputer, first exaop AI system, uses 27,648 NVIDIA GPUs to let top scientists race ahead.

Call it the most powerful scientific tool ever built.

Call it a new paradigm of computing.

Just don’t call it slow, because whatever number you look at, Summit — which made its debut Friday at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — is flat-out fast.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to introduce Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer. Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

This massive machine, powered by 27,648 of our Volta Tensor Core GPUs, can perform more than three exaops, or 3 billion calculations per second.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/volta-gpu-architecture/  

That’s more than 100 times faster than Titan, previously the fastest U.S. supercomputer, completed just five years ago.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2011/10/12/titan-supercomputer-points-the-way-to-exascale/  

And 95 percent of that computing power comes from GPUs.

Built for the U.S. Department of Energy, this is a machine designed to tackle the grand challenges of our time.

It will accelerate the work of the world’s best scientists in high-energy physics, materials discovery, healthcare and more, with the ability to crank out 200 petaflops of computing power to high-precision scientific simulations.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang speaking at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

“Summit is fast, but what Summit means is even more remarkable,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at Summit’s debut Friday.
“Summit is a magnificent scientific instrument that will attract the world’s great scientists.”

This is, literally, a scientific time machine.

The story behind the story:
The team at Oak Ridge was the first in the nation to realize — almost a decade ago — that a new kind of computing was needed.
The old paradigm of piling one transistor on top of another wouldn’t deliver the efficiency they needed.

They took a risk and built Titan in 2012, the world’s fastest supercomputer, with one GPU in every node.
That courage paid off.
Now over 550 HPC applications are accelerated with GPUs, and all of the 15 most widely used ones.
Their work reshaped supercomputing.

Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

Writing Computing’s Next Chapter

Summit is the next chapter.

Not just for ORNL, but for all of computing.

Our research team has been working with the DOE for more than 11 years on advanced technologies, including the Volta GPUs and NVLink high-speed interconnect technology at the very heart of Summit.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/nvlink/  

Instead of one GPU per node, Summit has six Tensor Core GPUs, delivering 10x Titan’s simulation performance.

And just as Titan inspired the world to accelerate simulations, Summit will inspire the world’s scientists to harness AI to drive discovery hand in hand with simulation.

The technology powering Summit is already speeding the work of scientists on everything from PCs to servers, workstations to sprawling cloud computing systems.

“Summit is a new breed of computer,” Huang said.
“Summit is the world’s largest AI supercomputer, a machine that learns. Its software will write software — amazing software that no human can write.”

Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

Fusing AI and High Performance Computing

But while Summit will share DNA with a new generation of machines built for AI, it will work at speeds like no other.

Researchers will be able to use the simplified calculations, known as half-precision, or FP16, to boost Summit’s performance about 15x to exascale levels — more than a billion billion operations per second.

That’s staggering. If every computation were represented by a single grain of sand, you could fill up the Houston Astrodome with sand 350 times in a single second.

Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

What Summit Will Do for Science

This speed will let today’s generation of scientists accomplish wonders.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is already a playground for cutting-edge science, and its campus is a hub for scientists eager to harness its machines to do their best work.

That’s why Summit already has a full schedule, accelerating projects including:

• Cancer Research:
The DOE and National Cancer Institute are working on a program called CANcer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE).

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-teams-with-national-cancer-institute-u-s-department-of-energy-to-create-ai-platform-for-accelerating-cancer-research  

Their aim is to develop tools that can automatically extract, analyze and sort health data to reveal previously hidden relationships between disease factors such as genes, biological markers and the environment.

• Fusion Energy:
Fusion, the energy source powering the sun, has long been touted for its promise of clean, abundant energy.
Summit will be able to model a fusion reactor and its magnetically confined plasma, hastening commercial development.

• Disease and Addiction:
Researchers will use AI to identify patterns in the function and evolution of human proteins and cellular systems.
These patterns can help us better understand Alzheimer’s, heart disease or addiction, and inform the drug discovery process.


Next Giant Leap for Mankind

Using techniques like machine learning and deep learning at a massive scale, scientists will achieve breakthroughs on Summit that will boost our economy, improve our healthcare and help deliver limitless energy.

This could help save the planet, and that’s why we need faster supercomputers.

And that’s why the next great computing challenge has already been set: building the world’s first exascale accelerated supercomputer.

We’re already racing to help get this done, so the scientists and researchers of the world can continue racing forward.

“To my friends and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Labs, a huge congratulation for reaching this Summit,” Huang said.
“From here, we can all jump to the next peak.”

Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. Photo courtesy of ORNL

5 Facts About the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

• At 200 petaflops — If everyone on Earth did 1 calculation/second, it would take 1 year to do what Summit does in 1 second.

• At 3 exaops of AI — If everyone on Earth did 1 calculation/second, it would take 15 years to do what Summit can do in 1 second.

• In an early test, a genomics team solved a problem in 1 hour that would take 30 years on a PC.

• Its 5,600 square feet of cabinet space are similar in size to two tennis courts.

• Summit has the approximate weight of a commercial jet.


Ian Buck

Ian Buck is vice president of NVIDIA's Accelerated Computing business unit, which includes all hardware and software product lines, third-party enablement and marketing activities for GPU computing.

Ian Buck Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

Ian joined NVIDIA in 2004 and created CUDA, which remains the leading platform for accelerated-based parallel computing.

Before joining NVIDIA, Ian was the development lead on Brook, which was the forerunner to generalized computing on GPUs.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and a B.S.E from Princeton University.

Jensen Huang’s Speech at Unveiling of Energy Department’s Summit Supercomputer

June 08, 2018

By Jensen Huang
Founder, President, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors, NVIDIA.


Secretary Perry, Governor Haslam, Senator Alexander, Director Zacharia, Ginnie, John, and the IBM team, and all of the amazing researchers of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it’s a great pleasure to be here today to inaugurate the Summit supercomputer.

Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors. Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

Summit is a remarkable machine.
The fastest computer ever made.
Every statistic of Summit is amazing.
It has 200 petaflops of high-precision computation — many times faster than the world’s fastest.

And because of a new invention we call the Volta Tensor Core GPU, it also does multi-precision mathematics and pumps out 3 quintillion operations per second — 3 exaops.
Exa is a big number — the universe is only half an exa-seconds old.

With 3 quintillion operations per second, Summit can simulate a human brain where each of the 100 billion neurons is modeled with 30 million instructions each second.
Summit is fast.

Summit is a magnificent scientific instrument that will attract the world’s great scientists.

Supercomputers are essential instruments of science. Like other magnificent scientific instruments — the Large Hadron Collider, the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, the 39-meter ELT Extremely Large Telescope or the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope — the Summit supercomputer will attract the world’s great scientists — the Einsteins of our time — to do their lives’ work, in their lifetime.
To them, we have built a time machine.

Summit is a milestone in a global race.
Not a race to space, but a race to all human knowledge — a race to understand everything. The prize for winning is the science, which is then shared with all humanity.

So why the fuss when everyone gets the prize?

The key is in the derivatives.
The community of world-class researchers attracted to the instrument.
The methods and engineering breakthroughs derived to create Summit.

If bold, conventional approaches won’t cut it — everything breaks — too slow, too costly, too large, impossible to cool, too hard to program.
All of that was true at the start of Summit.
Summit has a remarkable backstory that has shaped the future of computing.

Summit is possible today because of four giant bets:
• In 2005, we bet our company on a new way to do computing because CPU scaling was going to end and the world needs a path forward. In 2007, we announced the first CUDA GPU.

• In 2009, the leaders of Oak Ridge bet their careers and the lab on a then-nascent NVIDIA technology. Then in 2012, we announced Titan, the fastest supercomputer at the time and five times more energy efficient than anything else.

• In 2013, IBM, the world’s most important computer systems company, made a big bet on NVIDIA, a then-tiny company, to build its future supercomputers.

• In 2014, NVIDIA bet the farm again — this time on a new approach that fuses high-precision computing and deep learning into one architecture — the Volta Tensor Core GPU was born.

These were four “bet-the-farm” decisions that led to Summit.

Summit is a new breed of computer.

Summit is the world’s largest AI supercomputer, a machine that learns — its software will write software — amazing software no human can write.

Summit will simulate the world from existing knowledge, from first principles, while learning to recognize complex patterns, “connecting the dots” in a sea of incomprehensible data to discover new knowledge.

Today is a proud moment for our nation — not just for being first or building the biggest — but for having the courage of conviction to make big bets on our future.

Today is the start of an exciting new path for computing.

Today is a great day for science.

To my friends and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Lab, a huge congratulation for reaching this Summit.


Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.

Jensen Huang (Jen Hsun Huang) Photo courtesy of NVIDIA

NVIDIA invented the GPU in 1999 and, from its roots as a PC graphics company, has gone on to become the world leader in AI computing.

The company’s GPU computing platform creates the amazing virtual worlds of video games and Hollywood films and is the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can sense, understand and interact with the real world with superhuman capabilities.

Huang is a recipient of the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award from the Global Semiconductor Association in recognition of his exceptional contributions to driving the development, innovation, growth and long-term opportunities of the fabless semiconductor industry.

He has received the Daniel J. Epstein Engineering Management Award from the University of Southern California, and the EB Lemon Distinguished Alumni Award and an honorary doctorate from Oregon State University.

He was named to the U.S. Immigrant Entrepreneur Hall of Fame when it was established in 2012.
In 2016, Harvard Business Review ranked him No. 6 on its list of the world’s 100 best-performing CEOs, and No. 1 in the U.S., over the lifetime of their tenure.

Prior to founding NVIDIA, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices.

He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.


Source: NVIDIA Newsroom

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/  



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