Summit Achieves 445 Petaflops on New 'HPL-AI' Benchmark

Traditionally, supercomputer performance is measured using the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, which is the basis for the Top500 list that biannually ranks world's fastest supercomputers. The Linpack benchmark tests a supercomputer's ability to conduct high-performance tasks (like simulations) that use double-precision math. On June's Top500 list, announced Monday, Summit's 148 Linpack petaflops land it first place by a comfortable margin. Using that same machine configuration, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Nvidia have tested Summit on HPL-AI and gotten a result of 445 petaflops. While the HPL benchmark tests supercomputers' performance in double-precision math, AI is a rapidly growing use case for supercomputers -- and most AI models use mixed-precision math.