IBM Develops World's Most Powerful Commercial Supercomputer for Total

IBM announced it has built Pangea III, the world's most powerful commercial supercomputer for Total, a global energy company operating in more than 130 countries. The new IBM POWER9-based supercomputer will help Total more accurately locate new resources and better assess the potential associated revenue opportunities.

In addition, according to Total Pangea III requires 1.5 Megawatts, compared to 4.5 MW for its predecessor system. Combined with the increased performance of Pangea III, Total has reported that they have observed that the new system uses less than 10% the energy consumption per petaflop as its predecessor.

Pangea III is being built using the same POWER9 AI-optimized, high-performance architecture as used in the U.S. Department of Energy's Summit and Sierra supercomputers. Because POWER9 is optimized to take advantage of attached accelerators, it is designed to help Total not only improve performance but also improve energy efficiency in their HPC workloads.

In a competitive bidding process, Total selected IBM due to an industry-leading approach to GPU-accelerated computing. IBM worked with NVIDIA to jointly develop the industry's only CPU-to-GPU NVIDIA NVLink connection, which allows for 5.6x faster memory bandwidth between the POWER9 CPU and Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs than the compared x86-based systems. This will help Total to process the vast amount of data required in seismic modeling to get more accurate insights faster than they previously could.

According to Total, Pangea III, which has a computing power of 25 petaflops (equivalent to 130,000 laptops), with a storage capacity of 50 petabytes, becomes the No. 11 amongst all public and private supercomputers globally. Pangea III is also the #11 overall on the latest iteration of the Top500 ranking of supercomputers.