NEW YORK: IBM has just signed a deal worth $325 million with the Department of Energy to manufacture two supercomputers that leverage technology from NVIDIA and Mellanox.
The machines, which are known as Sierra and Summit, make use of IBM’s new supercomputer technology, and also include NVIDIA’s processing accelerators and Mellanox’s high-speed networking systems.
The supercomputers will be installed at the Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and are estimated to be five to seven times faster than the machines currently in use by federal agencies. A third lab, the Argonne National Laboratory, will choose another supercomputer at a yet-to-be-specified date.
The Sierra supercomputer will be used for nuclear weapons simulations at California’s Lawrence Liver more National Laboratory, while the Summit will be installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where it will be used for civilian research. Both machines are estimated to perform at more than 100 peta flops, and to put this into further perspective, that’s about three million times faster than your average present-day laptop, as per NVIDIA.
