DoE Bills IBM's Summit as 'World's Smartest Scientific Supercomputer'

Today’s topics include IBM announcing Summit, which it claims is the world’s most powerful scientific supercomputer, and Google introducing sole-tenant nodes for enterprise cloud customers.

On June 8, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled IBM’s Summit supercomputer and immediately billed it as the “world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer.”

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second, which is an astounding 200 quadrillion calculations, or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than America’s current top-ranked system, Titan, also housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For specific scientific applications, Summit will be capable of more than 3 billion mixed-precision calculations per second.

IBM said Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence, among other domains. Summit’s power is expected to enable scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

Google has launched a new “sole-tenant” node option for enterprises that want wholly dedicated physical servers to run their cloud workloads. The option is targeted at organizations with strict regulatory compliance requirements and those that want better control over isolating cloud workloads that utilize computing resources.

Sole-tenant nodes enable physical separation of the computing resources that are used to run workloads. Unlike typical virtual machines that run on shared physical hosts, sole-tenant nodes give an organization access to a whole host system for its own use.

The sole-tenant node option gives organizations the flexibility to deploy virtual machine instances with custom configurations. Enterprise administrators will also have the ability to manually carve out portions of a host machine on which they wish to launch a virtual machine instance.