The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will retire its Summit supercomputer in November 2024.
Writing on Twitter/X, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), where the system is housed, said: “After almost six years providing over 200 million node hours to researchers around the world, Summit will be decommissioned in November.”
Capable of achieving 148.6 petaflops, Summit is the ninth most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the most recent edition of the Top500 list.
The system was originally scheduled for shutdown at the beginning of 2024 but had its life extended after employees at the lab believed the system could still benefit the scientific community.
The 13MW system features 9,216 IBM Power 9 processors and 27,648 Nvidia Volta GPUs across 4,608 servers, connected via Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect. Its nodes are connected via Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network, delivering 200Gbps to each server.
During its additional operational year, it was expected that more than 100 research projects would be run on Summit, with the system also acting as a resource provider for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot plan to democratize access to AI technology and research.
Summit was the world’s most powerful supercomputer when it first came online in 2018, but has slowly been surpassed by a number of new systems, including Frontier, the world’s current most powerful supercomputer and also housed at ORNL.
Installed in 2021, Frontier – the world’s first exascale supercomputer – has topped five consecutive Top500 lists, receiving an HPL (high performance Linpack) benchmark score of 1.012 exaflops.
