ORNL Adds Powerful AI Appliances to Computing Portfolio

As home to three top-ranked supercomputers of the last decade, the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has become synonymous with scientific computing at the largest scales. Getting the most out of these science machines, however, requires a willingness to experiment with problems and systems of every size and scale. This is especially important as technology vendors introduce new system architectures and as scientists' problem-solving toolkit expands to include artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced data analysis. In that spirit, ORNL recently installed two NVIDIA DGX-2 systems, powerful GPU-accelerated appliances that will provide ORNL researchers with enhanced opportunities to conduct science--machine learning and data-intensive workloads in particular. The appliances will also provide an onramp to ORNL's Summit--the world's most powerful supercomputer--by enabling smaller and more experimental projects to be developed and tested before running on the 200-petaflop machine.