IBM built Summit & Sierra - Power Accelerated Computing Platform - Most powerful computers on Palnet

Supercomputing is the Formula One of computing. It’s where companies test bleeding-edge technology at an unprecedented scale. Supercomputers are generally used for research purposes, including tasks such as the virtual testing of nuclear bombs, trying to understand how the universe was formed, forecasting climate change and aerodynamic modeling for aircraft. 

        The U.S. now has two machines atop the world’s supercomputer rankings, with a pair of IBM  built systems holding first and second place. Summit and Sierra, supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are now ranked the #1 and #2 fastest computers. They are helping us model supernovas, pioneer new materials and explore cancer, genetics and the environment — using technologies available to all businesses.

The Design, Deployment, and Evaluation of these CORAL Pre-Exascale System are available at : http://sc18.supercomputing.org/proceedings/tech_paper/tech_paper_files/pap277s5.pdf where CORAL =  Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne & Lawrence Livermore National Labs

Summit is owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is designed for artificial intelligence workloads that pertain to high-energy physics and materials discovery, among other things. The lab claims it can perform more than 3 billion-billion calculations per second in some cases. Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

The Summit's theoretical peak speed is 200 petaflops, or 200,000 teraflops.To put that in human terms, approximately 6.3 billion people would all have to make a calculation at the same time, every second, for an entire year, to match what Summit can do in just one second.
 

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ORNL ESS Storage

Sierra is jointly operated by the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.Sierra, a new system at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra’s architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.

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Both CORAL pre-exascale machines are powered by a combination of IBM’s Power9 central processing units and Nvidia Corp.’s V100 graphics processing units. They’re enormous too, made up of numerous rows of refrigerator-sized computer cabinets. Summit boasts 2.4 million processor cores in total, while Sierra has 1.6 million.

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Power AC922 Memory DIMM

IBM defines floating-point encoding as "a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.". FLOPS is a common measure for any computer that runs these applications. In descending order of size are: yottaflop, zettaflop, exaflop, petaflop, teraflop, gigaflop and megaflop.

The 54th Top500, revealed on November 18, 2019 at SC19, is a familiar list: the U.S. Summit (ORNL) and Sierra (LLNL) machines, offering 148.6 and 94.6 petaflops respectively, remain in first and second place.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/11/18/top500-us-maintains-performance-lead-arm-tops-green500/ 

NOTE:Next, World’s fastest supercomputer will be built by AMD and Cray for US government. Frontier is expected to go online in 2021 with 1.5 exaflops of processing power. . (One exaflop is a thousand petaflops or a quintillion, 10 power 18, double precision floating point operations per second.) . Also, Supercomputer Fugaku, A64FX 48C 2.2GHz, Tofu interconnect D, Fujitsu ,RIKEN Center for Computational Science,Japan

Recently, IBM launched early Access program for  Power Linux servers in the IBM Virtual Private Cloud. Its a New Generation of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC. Users can now access AC922 supercomputer level performance with 2 Power CPU's, a Terabyte of Memory, 2-100Gbit Ethernet Links, and 4 NVIDIA v100 GPUs with NVLink2 CPU-GPU connectivity (7-10X faster than the competition). This enables a new generation of AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning applications, running on the IBM Cloud, which deliver business insight 3-4X faster than competitors.  Travis CI has launched enhancements to their build service which adds capability to now do builds on IBM Power, IBM Z and LinuxONE. This now enables tens of thousands of open source communities to enable their software on IBM platforms.

Reference:
http://www.sachinpbuzz.com/2019/07/ibms-summit-sierra-most-powerful.html?showComment=1576580688601
http://www.ieee-hpec.org/2018/2018program/index_htm_files/135.pdf 
https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-11-12-multi-cpu-architecture-ibm-power-ibm-z
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/announcements/next-gen-virtual-servers-vpc 
https://qz.com/1301510/the-us-has-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-again-the-200-petaflop-summit/