NVIDIA Powers World’s Top 13 Energy-Efficient Supercomputers

NVIDIA Tesla AI supercomputing platform powers the top 13 measured systems on the new Green500 list of the world’s most energy-efficient high performance computing (HPC) systems, according to an announcement from NVIDIA. All 13 use NVIDIA Tesla P100 data center GPU accelerators, including four systems based on the NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer.

Additionally, NVIDIA announced that its Tesla V100 GPU accelerators, which combine AI and traditional HPC applications on a single platform, are projected to provide the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Summit supercomputer with 200 petaflops of 64-bit floating point performance and over 3 exaflops of AI performance when it comes online later this year, the company reports.

The Green500 list, released at the 2017 International Supercomputing Show in Frankfurt, is topped by the new TSUBAME 3.0 system, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, powered by NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs.

Spots two through six on the new list are clusters housed at Yahoo Japan, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan’s Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (RIKEN), the University of Cambridge and the Swiss National Computing Center (CSCS), home to the newly crowned fastest supercomputer in Europe, Piz Daint. Other key systems in the top 13 measured systems powered by NVIDIA include E4 Computer Engineering, University of Oxford, and the University of Tokyo.

Systems built on NVIDIA’s DGX-1 AI supercomputer, which combines NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators with a fully optimized AI software package, include RAIDEN at RIKEN, JADE at the University of Oxford, a hybrid cluster at a social media and technology services company and NVIDIA’s SATURNV.

NVIDIA’s Summit supercomputer, is scheduled for delivery later this year to the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NVIDIA reports. Featuring Tesla V100 GPU accelerators, Summit is projected to deliver 200 petaflops of performance, the company asserts.

“AI is extending HPC and together they are accelerating the pace of innovation to help solve some of the world’s most important challenges,” says Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director of the Computing and Computational Science Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Oak Ridge’s pre-exascale supercomputer, Summit, is powered by NVIDIA Volta GPUs that provide a single unified architecture that excels at both AI and HPC.”

The computing capabilities of the V100 GPU accelerators will be available later this year as a service through several of the major cloud service providers.  Companies that have noted planned support for Volta-based services include Amazon Web Services, Baidu, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Tencent, NVIDIA reports.

To extend the reach of Volta, NVIDIA also announced it is making new Tesla V100 GPU accelerators available in a PCIe form factor for standard servers.

Specifications of the PCIe form factor include 7 teraflops double-precision performance, 14 teraflops single-precision performance and 112 teraflops half-precision performance with NVIDIA GPU BOOST technology; 16GB of CoWoS HBM2 stacked memory; support for PCIe Gen 3 interconnect and 250 watts of power.

NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators for PCIe-based systems are expected to be available later this year from NVIDIA reseller partner and manufacturers, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

For more info, visit NVIDIA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.