The once most powerful supercomputer in the world, Summit, will retire in November.

The Summit high-performance computing facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will retire in November 2024. The machine is becoming more and more expensive to maintain, and its efficiency is inferior to modern supercomputers.

Summit was launched in 2018 and immediately topped the TOP500 ranking of the most powerful computing systems in the world. The complex has 4608 nodes, each of which is equipped with two 22-core IBM POWER9 processors with a frequency of 3.07 GHz and six NVIDIA Tesla GV100 accelerators. The nodes are connected via a dual-link Mellanox EDR InfiniBand network, providing 200 Gbps of throughput per server. The energy consumption of the machine is slightly more than 10 MW.

Image source: ORNL

Summit’s FP64 performance reaches 148.6 Pflops (Linpack), and peak performance is 200.79 Pflops. Over the six years of its operation, the supercomputer has never left the top ten of TOP500: for example, in the current ranking it occupies ninth position.

Image source: ORNL

It was planned to retire Summit at the beginning of 2024. However, then the SummitPLUS initiative was launched, and the service life of the computing complex increased by almost a year. It is noted that this supercomputer turned out to be unusually productive. It has provided more than 200 million hours of computing node operation to researchers around the world.

ORNL currently operates a number of other supercomputers, including Frontier, the most powerful HPC complex in the world. Its peak performance reaches 1714.81 Pflops, or more than 1.7 Eflops. At the same time, the energy consumption is 22,786 kW: thus, the Frontier system is not only faster, but also significantly more energy efficient than the Summit. And in the spring of this year, due to the growing number of failures and leaks of the life support system, the 5.34-PFlops Cheyenne supercomputer was sold at auction.