Today, the Department of Energy has announced that is has granted $425 million to build two new supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as part of a broader CORAL initiative which is a collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore. $325 million of that will be spent on the actual supercomputer building while an additional $100 million will be used for the FastForward2 program, which is designed to encourage and enable hardware vendors to increase performance and efficiency for the next generation.

The first supercomputer, to be known as Summit, will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will replace the currently existing ‘Titan’ supercomputer which is capable of a peak performance of 27 petaflops. Summit will be capable of delivering between 150 and 300 peak petaflops and will be used for ‘open science’. The Sierra supercomputer, designed to replace the existing Sequoia will be used for nuclear security simulations and will be capable of speeds in excess of 100 petaflops as well. Both systems will be faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer right now, Tianhe-2 in China, which currently clocks in at 55 petaflops of peak performance. Argonne’s hardware win is yet to be announced, but will be unveiled at a later date.

In order to achieve this level of performance, the laboratories participating in the CORAL initiative are harnessing the power of IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Power 9 architecture CPUs and Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) yet-t0-be-announced Volta GPUs. This means that since this machine is expected to come online in 2017, that we can very likely expect to see Volta GPUs in 2017. The project will use Mellanox’s interconnect technologies to connect the systems together, but in order to connect the GPU to the CPU, they will be using Nvidia’s own NVLink GPU interconnect. NVLink is Nvidia’s own proprietary interconnect specifically designed to increase the communication speed between GPUs and Nvidia is working with IBM to get this interconnect embedded directly into the IBM Power CPUs that will be powering these different supercomputer designs. Additionally, the Summit supercomputer will also be using IBM’s own IBM Elastic Storage using GPFS technology and will store 120 petabytes of data.

The system as a whole, Summit, will only use 10% more power than Titan but will deliver approximately 5-10 the performance of Titan, illustrating where supercomputer designs are headed and how the Department of Energy is really trying to drive high performance increases while also promoting energy efficiency. The expected performance for Summit has already been stated to be between 150 and 300 petaflops, however, this is thanks to over 3400 compute nodes, each delivering 40 teraflops of performance alone. Each node will consist of IBM Power 9 CPU(s) and Nvidia Volta GPU(s), unfortunately we do not know if each node will be a dual processor node or how many GPUs will fit into each node, but the expectation would be a dual processor node with at least 2 GPUs per node.

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This hardware win for IBM and Nvidia is a huge one because it illustrates that the Open Power partnership between the two companies is working and that it can enable IBM to ship more CPUs. This is a very big deal for IBM and Nvidia because this is the first supercomputer in the US in a long time that will be built without either Intel or AMD CPUs. It also means that Nvidia will finally make use of NVLink, which they announced will be coming out with the Pascal GPU, the predecessor to Volta. Nvidia has already said we can expect to see Pascal in 2016, which means the transition from Pascal to Volta will be a fairly quick one.

The Department of Energy has stated that the whole purpose of these new supercomputer designs is to enable exascale computing. Both Coral and FastForward2 are supposed to enable hardware manufacturers to help their customers build efficient and powerful suptercomputers capable of over 1 exaflop (or 1000 petaflops). And if they can get the Summit supercomputer to 300 petaflops, that’s going to be a huge step forward to achieving exascale computing and an exaflop supercomputer.

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Ever since the announcement of the OpenPower Foundation (or consortium) there has been a lot of wondering about whether or not IBM would actually make something of it. After all, IBM’s market share in servers nowadays is fairly low compared to Intel’s and Intel has pretty much dominated the server market for the past 10 years. So, many saw IBM’s move to create the OpenPower Foundation as a desperate move to make something of their new Power8 processor technology and to broaden their market share at any cost. However, companies have been slowly joining IBM’s OpenPower Foundation and their movement has gotten quite some important companies to join in addition to the original founding members in Nvidia, Tyan, Mellanox and Google.

Since September of last year, OpenPower has added Altera, Samsung, Micron, Hitachi, Inspur, Teamsun, Verisilicon, ZTE, Fusion-IO, SKHynix and Xilinx. What this means is that OpenPower is growing, and its growing really fast and that spells trouble for Intel because OpenPower means that companies can utilize IBM’s incredibly powerful Power8 architecture and Power ISA without spending anywhere near the money they would if they simply bought into Intel’s ecosystem and paid thousands of dollars for Intel’s Xeon E5 and Xeon E7 x86 CPUs. Intel is the market leader and they know it, so they charge prices that make leaving Intel incredibly attractive whenever an opportunity presents itself. So, naturally, companies like Google and Facebook that have their own server farms and have hundreds of thousands if not millions of severs around the word are going to want to look for ways to boost performance and reduce cost. So, this week, Google showed off their own motherboard (probably manufactured for them by Foxconn) that utilizes two Power8 processors to power a server, effectively cutting Intel out of Google’s future server plans.

In a statement on Google+, Gordon McKean of Google talked about this new board that Google has developed and is showing off at the OpenPower booth at the IBM IMPACT 2014 conference. Obviously this statement was meant to be a significant one as this was Gordon’s first and last post on Google+ and it makes a pretty significant statement about Google porting over to Power8 from x86.

Today I’m excited to show off a Google POWER8 server motherboard in the OpenPOWER booth at the Impact 2014 conference in Las Vegas.  We’re always looking to deliver the highest quality of service for our users, and so we built this server to port our software stack to POWER (which turned out to be easier than expected, thanks in part to the liitle-endian support in P8). A real server platform is also critical for detailed performance measurements and continuous optimizations, and to integrate and test the ongoing advances that become available through OpenPOWER and the extended OpenPOWER community. (Google, IBM and others formed the OpenPOWER Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing an open ecosystem.)

Clearly, Google and IBM are making progress with their OpenPower Foundation and companies like Intel should be watching them very closely because they have everything that they need from all of the key companies to be able to turn this OpenPower Foundation into something seriously competitive with Intel. Ironically, though, companies like Mellanox are very closely allied with Intel, but are still members of OpenPower because in the end, their technology is really processor agnostic and if they can sell more interconnects, why not? If you look closely at the board, you can see that Google intentionally blacked out a lot of the ICs on the board, which isn’t very open of them, but is probably done in order to keep their platform safe from prying eyes until it starts being deployed on a broad scale.

A Google built IBM Power8 Motherboard

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