It’s official: we know have a new leader among the world’s supercomputers. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and IBM announced some impressive AI performance numbers from the new Summit supercomputer. Summit is now the world’s “most powerful and smartest supercomputer”, unseating the previous record-holder, a Chinese supercomputer named Sunway TaihuLight.
Some are calling Summit an AI beast.
Summit was designed with 4,608 of IBM’s newest generation POWER9 Systems and 27,648 of NVIDIA’s Volta GPUs. IBM says this is the first supercomputer to be designed expressly for the purpose of AI – an AI supercomputer by design.
Of course, like other supercomputers, Summit’s design is suited for workloads including nuclear physics, seismology and climate science. Such workloads usually start with a model and a set of conditions and then mine huge volumes of data to answer grand challenge questions.
But what is different and very special about the Summit design is that it’s creators also planned for new kinds of AI computing models. Examples of such computing include Machine Learning/Deep Learning (which make use of Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks), and Genomics.
So what does this really mean to you and me?
While we can all take pride in the technical advances made possible by some very smart and dedicated people from the public and private sectors, this AI supercomputer will have a more direct impact on our lives, more than any other past and existing supercomputer.
Why?
Let’s face it. Most of the supercomputers on the Top500 list reside in National Laboratories, Defense Departments, Departments of Energy, Space agencies, large oil companies, or similar institutions, and the compute resources are tightly controlled and targeted in areas of “parochial” interest.
Summit, which is architected for AI, is different in two ways:
- It supports AI workloads that will spawn innovations that will have material impact on our personal lives, and,
- It is based on building blocks – Power9 CPU’s, Nvidia GPU’s – that can be “scaled down”, making this platform available to businesses of all sizes.
On the first point, it doesn’t take much imagination to start to see how the world’s most powerful AI Supercomputer, can be applied to life changing transformations:
Saving the lives of children! Gene sequencing and genomic science breakthroughs have been limited by our ability to crunch such complex calculations. Summit provides a 25x performance increase over the 2012 Titan supercomputer and over 10,0000x faster than other codes and platforms. Scientists will now better understand, prevent, detect, diagnose and treat diseases faster. Improved diagnosis, better treatment and drugs for diseases like Alzheimers, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, drug addictions and more. We can save our children from childhood diseases and we can live stronger and longer.
Survive cancer! What used to be done exclusively for clinical trial patients can now be made available to all patients. Machine learning algorithms scaled on Summit will provide medical researchers with a comprehensive view of the cancer population at clinical trial detail level. Everyone who has lost someone to cancer can now rest assure that many more will survive.
Live a better life! Summit helps to design optimal deep learning at an atomic microscopy level. It finds in just a few hours what would take a human expert months to uncover. This enables automatic material nanofabrication at speed and scale. We will have better semi-conductors and materials for our buildings and gadgets to make our lives more comfortable.
Safe lives with self-driving cars. Summit will accelerate the innovation around autonomous driving, making possible a more efficient, safe, and personal transportation experience. It will make for safer roads with better route management, no more traffic jams, and accident free driving, that will dramatically reduce auto fatalities. No more deaths due to texting, drunk driving, carelessness, and general bad drivers. I can imagine a time, in the not not too distant future, where automobiles driven by humans will be deemed unsafe, and outlawed.
Safer streets. A surveillance camera captures streaming images which can be "seen" by AI algorithms, to recognize threats, faces, and crimes, and initiate appropriate responses. Home surveillance systems, which are very affordable, will link with AI cloud services to provide similar safety solutions.
Small and medium enterprises can harness the capabilities of AI too. The technology used by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build Summit is available in the IBM PowerAI servers. It is an “AI in a box”.
An AI Supercomputer is a "big deal". Just as the discovery of penicillin had a profound effect on public health and the quality of life, so too, the innovations made possible by Summit will effect of lives in far-reaching ways. Summit will contribute to cleaner oceans, longer and healthier lives, equal opportunities across more professions, and to our general, overall well-being.
Again, supercomputing and AI, that used to be in the hands of a few, is now available for all, via IBM PowerAI. These AI capabilities and accelerated computing are now available to small and medium enterprises, who have no limits on the innovations they can drive.
What would you do with an AI Supercomputer?
Eric
Please share with your network and join the conversation by adding comments below.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter too. Reach out anytime.
