Learning to Scale the Summit: AI for Science on a Leadership Supercomputer

The Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been the world's top AI for science supercomputer for several years, ranked world's fastest computer at its 2018 launch and currently top system in the US and #2 on the TOP500 list. Summit's purposeful design to handle both conventional modeling and simulation science and emerging AI workloads has made it a leading destination for AI-powered computational science. We report here on AI for science usage on Summit near the midpoint of its lifespan. We review AI usage across the many science projects that have used Summit. We then examine in detail a set of applications scaling AI to full system as well as projects implementing AI-coordinated science discovery workflows on Summit. Finally, we offer some observations regarding the future of advancing scientific knowledge and understanding via AI, especially in the context of leadership-class scientific computing.