With Livermore’s Sierra, the U.S. now holds two of the top three most powerful computers
Suddenly, your smart phone feels really dumb.
Meet Sierra, Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s’ new supercomputer that can perform 125 quadrillion calculations per second — think 125 followed by 15 zeroes — and will guard our nation’s nuclear stockpile.
To match that, every person on Earth would have to do one calculation every second, for 24 hours a day – for an entire year.
Unveiled Friday, the $150 million Sierra gives the United States bragging rights to two of the top three positions in global supercomputing. The new machine ranks behind Oak Ridge National Lab’s Summit and China’s Sunway TaihuLight.
It’s not just powerful, it has a stunning memory. There’s enough storage space to hold every written work of humanity, in all languages – twice.
“But it is not how big or where it ranks, it’s the science it will support,” said Bronis de Supinski, Livermore Computing’s chief technology officer and head of Livermore Lab’s Advanced Technology systems.
Sierra was conceived in a hotel room near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport at the end of 2012, in a U.S. Department of Energy collaboration between Livermore, Oak Ridge and Argonne. But over its four years of construction, the project encountered logistical hiccups, technical challenges and one major surprise: The surging cost of memory, tied to the global demand for smart phones. It caused prices to double in the final three months of 2016, said de Supinski. After negotiations, IBM made changes to its network to compensate, keeping the project on budget.
Despite our advances, the National Security Agency and the Department of Energy have warned that China is poised to outrank America in high-performance computing.
Built by IBM and NVIDIA, Sierra is desiged to support the nation’s three nuclear security laboratories: Lawrence Livermore, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
And that support is critical. As North Korea continues to pursue nuclear-weapon technologies, our system is aging. Not even a bicycle is engineered to sit inactive for decades and still be able to spring into action at a moment’s notice. But that’s what is expected of a nuclear weapon.
For example, how would a hairline crack affect the life of a nuclear warhead? Without detonation, Sierra helps us find out. It can process the data needed to create a 3D picture, modeling and simulating a growing fracture in the deadly device.We'll have more on this next week.
“It enables simulations 100,000 times more realistic than is possible on a desktop,” said Fred Streitz, director of the Lab’s Institute for Scientific Computer Research....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
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New GPU-Accelerated Supercomputers Change the Balance of Power on the TOP500
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"NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally on How GPUs Ignited AI, and Where His Team’s Headed Next" (NVDA)
With the publication of the latest Top500 list (next post), the talk of the High Performance Computing world is the convergence of AI and HPC, both of which are facilitated by Graphics Processing Units.
So let's go to the source. From the NVIDIA blog:...
June 15
Sandia National Lab to Install First Petascale Supercomputer Powered by ARM Processors (Masayoshi Son smiles)
June 6
"IBM builds world’s most powerful supercomputer to crack AI" (IBM; NVDA)
January 2018
With the Summit Supercomputer, U.S. Could Retake Computing’s Top Spot (NVDA)
We've been babbling about this 'puter for three years, usually in the context of its use of NVIDIA GPU's and NV Link connections, more after the jump....
September 2017
"The Astonishing Engineering Behind America's Latest, Greatest Supercomputer"
And many more. Use the 'search blog' box, keywords: Oak Ridge.
