Summit
The Next Peak in HPC

Summit is the next leap in leadership-class computing systems for open science. With Summit we will be able to address, with greater complexity and higher fidelity, questions concerning who we are, our place on earth, and in our universe.

Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan’s 18,688 nodes, using only approximately 3,400 nodes when it arrives in 2017. Like Titan, Summit will have a hybrid architecture, and each node will contain multiple IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs all connected together with NVIDIA’s high-speed NVLink. Each node will have over half a terabyte of coherent memory (high bandwidth memory + DDR4) addressable by all CPUs and GPUs plus 800GB of non-volatile RAM that can be used as a burst buffer or as extended memory. To provide a high rate of I/O throughput, the nodes will be connected in a non-blocking fat-tree using a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect.

Upon completion, Summit will allow researchers in all fields of science unprecedented access to solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Summit Fact Sheet

Titan vs Summit

Compute System Comparison

Attribute	Titan	Summit
Compute Nodes	18,688	~3,400
Processor	(1) 16-core AMD Opteron per node	(Multiple) IBM POWER 9s per node
Accelerator	(1) NVIDIA Kepler K20x per node	(Multiple) NVIDIA Volta GPUs per node
Memory per node	32GB (DDR3)	>512GB (HBM+DDR4)
CPU-GPU Interconnect	PCI Gen2	NVLINK (5-12x PCIe3)
System Interconnect	Gemini	Dual Rail EDR-IB (23 GB/s)
Peak Power Consumption	9 MW	10 MW

Summit FAQs

Center for Accelerated Application Readiness

The OLCF has selected the next set of partnership projects into its Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program, a collaborative effort of application development teams and staff from the OLCF Scientific Computing group to prepare for Summit. These projects were chosen based on a computational and scientific review conducted by the OLCF in consultation with the ALCF, NERSC, IBM and NVIDIA. The application teams represent a broad range of computational algorithms and programming approaches in a diverse range of scientific disciplines including astrophysics, biophysics, chemistry, climate modeling, combustion engineering, materials science, nuclear physics, plasma physics and seismology.

CAAR Projects

PREPARING USERS FOR SUMMIT TIMELINE

CAAR Call for Proposals Opens CY2014 Q4

Open call for proposals to collaborate with the OLCF to prepare scientific applications for Summit.
CAAR Proposal Review CY2015 Q1

Review Proposals to select the 8 CAAR teams.
CAAR Workshops CY2015 Q2

Workshops to help introduce CAAR teams to Summit
CAAR Application Readiness Phase I & II CY2015 Q2 – CY2017 Q2

CAAR teams work to refactor and port code
Summit Monthly Screen Casts Begin CY2017 Q3

Monthly online tutorials to introduce users to various aspects of Summit
Summit Webinars Begin CY2017 Q4

Monthly webinars to prepare users to for Summit
Summit On-Site Workshops Begin CY2018 Q1

On-site, hands-on workshops to prepare users for Summit
Summit General User Access Begins CY2018

Target date for user access to Summit

Transitioning to Summit:
Preparing Titan Users for Fivefold Computing Power

Summit will provide revolutionary performance by way of evolutionary changes to the current Titan hybrid architecture, making Summit an ideal follow-on system to Titan. By developing and refactoring applications to improve performance portability on accelerated architectures, Titan users will be better positioned to take advantage of Summit, as well as other next-generation leadership computing resources, and beyond. Users can create applications that explore performance portability and exploit untapped parallelism by:

Using accelerated programming libraries whenever possible
Preferring high-level compiler directives such as Open MP/Open ACC over low-level frameworks such as CUDA or OpenCL
Exposing as much node-level parallelism as possible
Relying on a suite of development tools to maximize parallelism

The OLCF has established best practices for leadership-class computing for more than a decade. The OLCF created the Center for Accelerated Application Readiness, or CAAR, to help prepare codes for future generation systems. For Summit, CAAR will have a competition and select eight partnership teams to prepare their important scientific applications for highly effective use on Summit. The partnership teams, consisting of the core developers of the application and OLCF staff, will receive support from the IBM/NVIDIA Center of Excellence at ORNL and have access to multiple computational resources. For more information about CAAR, please visit CAAR: Call for Proposals.

Coinciding with the Summit launch, the OLCF will offer various tutorials, webinars, and workshops to help make sure users are ready on day one. During this three-year period of planning and development, please be aware that the OLCF’s goal is to smoothly transition from Titan to Summit by providing an abundance of guidance to users during the process.

Workshops

Prior to the Summit launch, OLCF user assistance staff and vendor partners will host workshops to ensure users get the most out of Summit as well as the facility’s data and storage resources.

Webinars

While users can still join us in person for Summit workshops, we will also provide them as webinars so users can plug in from anywhere in the world and refer to these resources at any time.

Tutorials

Users preparing applications for Summit will be able to access coding tutorials prior to the Summit launch that provide “how-to” examples of programming operations for an accelerated architecture.

Documentation

Extensive details on the Summit system, including software installations, file systems, programming environment, and more will be available online as a Summit User Guide before Summit is operational.