To power AI applications and research across engineering, science, and medicine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center has just installed a new GPU-accelerated supercomputer, powered by 896 NVIDIA Tensor Core V100 GPUs. According to MIT, the new system named TX-GAIA for Green AI Accelerator was ranked by TOP500 as the most powerful AI supercomputer at any university in the world. "We are thrilled by the opportunity to enable researchers across Lincoln and MIT to achieve incredible scientific and engineering breakthroughs," said Jeremy Kepner, a Lincoln Laboratory Fellow who heads the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center. "TX-GAIA will play a large role in supporting AI, physical simulation, and data analysis across all Laboratory missions," he added. The new supercomputer has a peak performance of 100 AI petaFLOPs, as measured by the computing speed required to perform mixed-precision floating-point operations commonly used in building deep neural networks.

The new TX-GAIA (Green AI Accelerator) computing system at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) has been ranked as the most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer at any university in the world. The ranking comes from TOP500, which publishes a list of the top supercomputers in various categories biannually. The system, which was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, combines traditional high-performance computing hardware -- nearly 900 Intel processors -- with hardware optimized for AI applications -- 900 Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators. "We are thrilled by the opportunity to enable researchers across Lincoln and MIT to achieve incredible scientific and engineering breakthroughs," says Jeremy Kepner, a Lincoln Laboratory fellow who heads the LLSC. "TX-GAIA will play a large role in supporting AI, physical simulation, and data analysis across all laboratory missions." TOP500 rankings are based on a LINPACK Benchmark, which is a measure of a system's floating-point computing power, or how fast a computer solves a dense system of linear equations.