From Reuters, October 27:
The U.S. has formed a $1 billion partnership with Advanced Micro Devices to construct two supercomputers that will tackle large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su told Reuters.
The U.S. is building the two machines to ensure the country has enough supercomputers to run increasingly complex experiments that require harnessing enormous amounts of data-crunching capability. The machines can accelerate the process of making scientific discoveries in areas the U.S. is focused on.Energy Secretary Wright said the systems would "supercharge" advances in nuclear power and fusion energy, technologies for defense and national security, and the development of drugs. Scientists and companies are trying to replicate fusion, the reaction that fuels the sun, by jamming light atoms in a plasma gas under intense heat and pressure to release massive amounts of energy. "We've made great progress, but plasmas are unstable, and we need to recreate the center of the sun on Earth," Wright told Reuters."We're going to get just massively faster progress using the computation from these AI systems that I believe will have practical pathways to harness fusion energy in the next two or three years." Wright said the supercomputers would also help manage the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons and accelerate drug discovery by simulating ways to treat cancer down to the molecular level. "My hope is in the next five or eight years, we will turn most cancers, many of which today are ultimate death sentences, into manageable conditions," Wright said.The plans call for the first computer called Lux to be constructed and come online within the next six months. It will be based around AMD's MI355X artificial intelligence chips, and the design will also include central processors (CPUs) and networking chips made by AMD. The system is co-developed by AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)....
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Combined with today's news from QCOM Nvidia's Mr. Huang has some stuff to think about tonight:
Qualcomm (QCOM) shares soared more than 20% Monday before closing the day out up 11% after the company announced it is entering the data center market its new AI200 and AI250 chips and rack-scale server offerings.
The move puts Qualcomm into direct competition with the likes of Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD), as the company seeks to stake its claim to a portion of the multibillion-dollar data center market....
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The U.S. National Laboratories have quite a few spots on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers. From TOP500.org, most recent semi-annual update: June 2025:The 65th edition of the TOP500 showed that the El Capitan system retains the No. 1 position. With El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, there are now 3 Exascale systems leading the TOP500. All three are installed at Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories in the United States....
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| Rank | System | Cores | Rmax (PFlop/s) | Rpeak (PFlop/s) | Power (kW) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
El Capitan - HPE Cray EX255a, AMD 4th Gen EPYC 24C 1.8GHz, AMD Instinct MI300A, Slingshot-11, TOSS,
HPE
DOE/NNSA/LLNL United States |
11,039,616 | 1,742.00 | 2,746.38 | 29,581 |
| 2 |
Frontier - HPE Cray EX235a, AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz, AMD Instinct MI250X, Slingshot-11, HPE Cray OS,
HPE
DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory United States |
9,066,176 | 1,353.00 | 2,055.72 | 24,607 |
| 3 |
Aurora - HPE Cray EX - Intel Exascale Compute Blade, Xeon CPU Max 9470 52C 2.4GHz, Intel Data Center GPU Max, Slingshot-11,
Intel
DOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory United States |
9,264,128 | 1,012.00 | 1,980.01 | 38,698 |
| 4 |
JUPITER Booster - BullSequana XH3000, GH
Superchip 72C 3GHz, NVIDIA GH200 Superchip, Quad-Rail NVIDIA InfiniBand
NDR200, RedHat Enterprise Linux,
EVIDEN
EuroHPC/FZJ Germany |
4,801,344 | 793.40 | 930.00 | 13,088 |
| 5 |
Eagle - Microsoft NDv5, Xeon Platinum 8480C 48C 2GHz, NVIDIA H100, NVIDIA Infiniband NDR,
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure United States |
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