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Summit by the Numbers

By June 8, 2018Technology2 min read

America’s most powerful supercomputer is a machine for scientific discovery.

The US Department of Energy’s Summit supercomputer located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory enables scientists to simulate complex physical systems and make predictions critical to advancing research and development.

Summit’s “smart” architecture merges GPU acceleration and dense local memory to support expanding applications in data science and artificial intelligence.

  • A 200-petaflop machine, Summit can perform 200 quadrillion (peta-) floating point operations per second (flops). If every person on Earth completed one calculation per second, it would take 305 days to do what Summit can do in 1 second.
  • For some AI applications, researchers can use less precise calculations than flops, potentially quadrupling Summit’s performance to exascale levels, or more than a billion billion calculations per second.
  • Summit is connected by 185 miles of fiber optic cables—or the distance from Knoxville to Nashville, Tennessee.
  • Summit’s file system can store 250 petabytes of data, or the equivalent of 74 years of high-definition video.
  • At over 340 tons, Summit’s cabinets, file system, and overhead infrastructure weigh more than a large commercial aircraft.
  • Occupying 5,600 sq. ft. of floor space, Summit could fill two tennis courts.
  • More than 4,000 gallons of water pump through Summit’s cooling system every minute, carrying away about 13 megawatts of heat.