The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Summit supercomputer is being decommissioned this month after spending several years churning through data 24/7. As part of its retirement, HPC Guru said on X that the ORNL planned a virtual farewell on Zoom for the once most powerful computer in the world. And although it’s set to be retired this month, it’s still running at almost full power, with only about 0.5% of its nodes running idle.
The supercomputer has been used by thousands of customers worldwide for various reasons. It even ran during the 2020 Coronavirus Global Pandemic and helped find a protein that would bind with the virus and prevent it from infecting people. Even as newer, more powerful supercomputers emerged, Summit was still able to retain the ninth spot in the Top 500.
