NVIDIA at the Supercomputing 2017 conference announced a major upgrade of its new SaturnV AI supercomputer, which when complete, the company claims, will be not just one of the world’s top-10 AI supercomputers in terms of raw compute power; but will also the world’s most energy-efficient. The SaturnV will be a cluster supercomputer with 660 NVIDIA DGX-1 nodes. Each such node packs eight NVIDIA GV100 GPUs, which takes the machine’s total GPU count to a staggering 5,280 (that’s GPUs, not CUDA cores). They add up to an FP16 performance that’s scraping the ExaFLOP (1,000-petaFLOP or 10^18 FLOP/s) barrier; while its FP64 (double-precision) compute performance nears 40 petaFLOP/s (40,000 TFLOP/s).
SaturnV should beat Summit, a supercomputer being co-developed by NVIDIA and IBM, which in turn should unseat Sunway TaihuLight, that’s currently the world’s fastest supercomputer. This feat gains prominence as NVIDIA SaturnV and NVIDIA+IBM Summit are both machines built by the American private-sector, which are trying to beat a supercomputing leader backed by the mighty Chinese exchequer. The other claim to fame of SaturnV is its energy-efficiency. Before its upgrade, SaturnV achieved an energy-efficiency of a staggering 15.1 GFLOP/s per Watt, which was already the fourth “greenest.” NVIDIA expects the upgraded SaturnV to take the number-one spot.
SaturnV powered by Volta and NVIDIA-IBM Summit aren’t the only Volta powered giants. Japan’s ABCI supercomputer was recently infused with 4,352 GV100 GPUs, taking its peak FP64 throughput to 37 petaFLOP/s. It’s the first exaFLOP-scale supercomputer in the world (with 0.55 exaFLOP peak FP16 throughput).
