At the recent International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, IBM, along with NVIDIA and two U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories, announced a pair of Centers of Excellence for supercomputing – one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the other at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The collaborations support IBM’s supercomputing contract with the U.S. Department of Energy and will enable advanced, large-scale scientific and engineering applications both for supporting DOE missions, and for the Summit and Sierra supercomputer systems to be delivered respectively to Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore in 2017 and to be operational in 2018. As the new supercomputers are being readied for installation, the Centers of Excellence will prepare the way for their optimum use in scientific research.
Incorporating IBM’s advanced POWER processors with next-generation NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators and the NVIDIA NVLink high-speed processor interconnect, Summit and Sierra will use a highly efficient, high-performance data-centric computing approach that minimizes data in motion, thereby helping to optimize problem solving and time to solution while also reducing overall energy consumption. In addition to their data-centric design, the systems follow an OpenPOWER design concept that uses IBM’s open POWER architecture, as well as OpenPOWER Foundation member technology, including NVIDIA GPU and NVLink technologies, and Mellanox’s EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand system interconnect.
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