According to the recent reports, the US government’s Department of Energy has declared that it would work with the companies like IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox to build supercomputers, which will be the fastest in the world. The supercomputers will be launched by 2017. The government has decided to pay $425 million to these 3 companies to make these computers. The GPU-accelerated supercomputers would be named Sierra and Summit. These supercomputers buildup includes IBM’s OpenPower chips, NVIDIA’s new graphics chip Volta and the high speed networking by Mellanox.
Tom Rosamilia, SVP of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, said “The recent announcement spots a shift from conventional super-computing approaches as they are no longer viable as the data grows at massive rates. The IBM’s Data Centric approach is a new paradigm in computing, marking the future of open computing platforms and capable of addressing the growing rates of data.”
Therefore, the companies will wire up and add all of their best softwares into the combined building processes of supercomputers. “Today’s science is tomorrow’s technology. Researchers are undertaking enormous challenges from quantum to global to galactic scales. Their work relies on increasingly more powerful supercomputers. Through the invention of GPU acceleration, we have paved the path to exascale super-computing — giving scientists a tool for unimaginable discoveries,” CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang said.
From both of Sierra and Summit, Summit would be more powerful in terms of its capacities and will probably convey 150-300 peak petaflops. Summit supercomputer will available for both scientific and civilian use, though Sierra will just be used at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for nuclear weapon simulations. Until now, Oak Ridge’s supercomputer called Titan is the fastest in the world, these two new inventories are going to be out racing Titan which conveys only 27 peak petaflop.
