In November 2014, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), announced plans for an ambitious new chapter in scientific computing: the Summit supercomputer, a machine capable of supplying five to ten times more computing power than current leadership-class systems (see Figure 1). Scientists, in turn, could harness this computational behemoth to address longstanding challenges in science and engineering. © 2018 IEEE.