Summit is tasked with civilian scientific research and is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

[11] Summit was estimated to cover 5,600 square feet (520 m2)[12] and require 219 kilometres (136 mi) of cabling,[13] and was designed to be used for research in diverse fields such as cosmology, medicine, and climatology.

[22] To provide a high rate of data throughput, the nodes are connected in a non-blocking fat-tree topology using a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect for both storage and inter-process communications traffic, which delivers both 200 Gbit/s bandwidth between nodes and in-network computing acceleration for communications frameworks such as MPI and SHMEM/PGAS.

The in-system layer is optimized for fast storage with SSDs on each node, while the center-wide parallel file system provides easy to access data stored on hard drives.

It was one of the first supercomputers that also required extremely fast metadata performance to support AI/ML workloads exemplified by the 2.6M 32k file creates per second it delivers.