IEEE Spectrum IN 2018, a new supercomputer called Summit was installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee. Its theoretical peak capacity was nearly 200 petaflopsâthatâs 200 thousand trillion floating-point operations per second. At the time, it was the most powerful supercomputer in the world, beating out the previous record holder, Chinaâs Sunway TaihuLight, by a comfortable margin, according to the well-known Top500 ranking of supercomputers. (Summit is currently No. 2, a Japanese supercomputer called Fugaku having since overtaken it.)
In just four short years, though, demand for supercomputing services at Oak Ridge has outstripped even this colossal machine. âSummit is four to five times oversubscribed,â says Justin Whitt, who directs ORNLâs Leadership Computing Facility. âThat limits the number of research projects that can use it…
