The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Summit supercomputer is beingdecommissioned this monthafter spending several years churning through data 24/7. As part of its retirement, HPC Guru said onXthat the ORNL planned a virtual farewell on Zoom for theonce most powerful computer in the world. And although it’s set to be retired this month, it’s still running at almost full power, with only about 0.5% of its nodes running idle.
The supercomputer has been used by thousands of customers worldwide for various reasons. It even ran during the 2020 Coronavirus Global Pandemic andhelped find a proteinthat would bind with the virus and prevent it from infecting people. Even as newer, more powerful supercomputers emerged, Summit was still able to retain the ninth spot in the Top 500.
Still, the Frontier supercomputer, which currently holds the top spot as the most powerful supercomputer, is already running in ORNL since 2022. Although it consumes over two times the power that Summit needs (22,768kW versus 10,096kW), it delivers over eight times the computing performance, making it far more efficient. The national laboratory is also working ondiamond-based quantum accelerators with Quantum Brilliance(QB) as part of its research on quantum computing.
Virtual farewell on Zoom for #Summit planned for tomorrowThe current #9 #supercomputer is busy till the last minute - only 27 out of 4742 nodes are currently idleInfo courtesy Constantinos Evangelinos (@ce107@mast.hpc.social)https://t.co/08oDO8H071#HPC #AI @OLCFGOV https://t.co/7thQHAVPsfNovember 15, 2024
Power efficiency is the number one problem for many supercomputers and AI data centers, especially as the latest generations of processors, both AI and otherwise, consume more and more power. This has reached the point that many companies, likeGoogle,Microsoft,Amazon, and Oracle, are investing in nuclear energy to deliver the projected power needs of future processors.
However, even current data centers are asking for more power, with Elon Musk’sxAI Colossus just getting approval for 150MWs of electricityfrom the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). All this meant that many companies were missing their climate targets, with Google’s carbon footprint jumping by more than 40% from 2019 and Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions increasing by nearly 30% from 2020. Aformer Google CEO even suggested suspending climate targetsto alI technologies to go full tilt and then use that technology to catch up in the future.
While we cannot stop humanity’s desire for more computing power, ORNL’s move to retire its supercomputer for a more efficient one is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, chip makers like Nvidia, AMD, and Intel could make processors as efficient as they are influential in the future, thus reducing humanity’s demand for more electricity.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
