IBM is working with Nvidia to create new generation supercomputers

The US Department of Energy allocated 325 million US dollars to IBM to create two supercomputers that have already received their own names: Sierra and Summit. The systems will use IBM technology, Nvidia processor accelerators and Mellanox network infrastructure.

One of the supercomputers will perform calculations on projects that are needed for power engineers, meteorologists, physicists, and representatives of other specialties. This work will be done by Sierra, and the system will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Tennessee). The second supercomputer, Summit, will work for the benefit of the military at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (California).
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Systems will be identical. The peak performance of each of the supercomputers will be 100 petaflops, which automatically puts the system in 1st place in the Top500 list. According to rough estimates by Nvidia experts, to achieve such performance, you need to collect 3 million powerful laptops into a single system.

Additionally, the US Department of Energy will allocate about $ 100 million to the FastForward2 project. The goal of the project is the creation of next-generation supercomputers, which will be 20-40 times more productive than modern systems.

It is now known that the Power family of processors from IBM, and Nvidia's Volta graphics accelerators will be installed in supercomputers. Connect Power8 and Volta is planned through the interface Nvidia NVLink. This interface, according to experts, allows you to speed up data transfer from 5 to 12 times. According to IBM representatives, in this project one of the progressive ideas is to locate computer centers as close as possible to the data storage, in order to increase the performance of supercomputers.

To increase performance, the systems will also use not ordinary hard drives, but systems with flash drives. As mentioned above, the third partner of the project is the company Mellanox, which supplies high-performance network equipment that supports the InfiniBand standard.