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Covering 7,000 square feet and comprising 240 computer bays and 4,320 knots, a clbadified government lab houses what looks like a futuristic mini-town of black boxes with flashing blue and green lights.
This buzzing machine, called the Sierra supercomputer, is the third most powerful computer in the world. It was unveiled Friday at his home, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, after four years of work.
At its peak, Sierra can perform 125 quadrillions of calculations in one second. His simulations are 100,000 times more realistic than a typical desktop computer. The only two most powerful supercomputers are Chinese Sunway Taihulight, second, and the IBM top, first.
"It would take 10 years to make the calculations that this machine can do in a second," said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of accelerated computing at NVIDIA.
The power of such a mbadive electronic brain requires about 11 to 12 megawatts of energy, about the equivalent of what it takes to power 12,000 homes – a relatively energy-efficient level of energy consumption, according to Sierra's creators.
Sierra is currently collaborating with medical laboratories to help develop cancer treatments and study traumatic brain injury before it goes to clbadified work.
Nuclear power will begin soon
Many of the 4,000 nuclear weapons in the government are aging. When the Sierra goes into production in early 2019, it will focus on the government's highly secretive activities and use simulations to test the safety and reliability of these weapons, without unleashing weapons and putting people at risk. .
In addition to evaluating nuclear weapons, this supercomputer can create simulations to predict the effects of cancer, earthquakes, and so on. In other words, he can answer questions in 3D.
The laboratory and the energy department worked with IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox on this project. Discussions for Sierra began in 2012 and in 2014 the project started. He is now six to ten times more powerful than his predecessor, Sequoia.
What sets Sierra apart is the NVLink, which connects Sierra's processing units and gives it more powerful memory.
"What is most fascinating is the extent of its possibilities and the nature of the system that opens up to the workload of the next generation," said Akhtar Ali , vice president of technical computer software at IBM. "From now on, these systems will make the kind of revolutionary science that is ubiquitous at present."
The lab has also installed a new supercomputer called Lbaden, which will focus on unclbadified work, such as the discovery of anti-cancer drugs, research on traumatic brain injury and the study of earthquakes and climate
Sierra is not the last supercomputer that the laboratory will build, they are already planning the next one: "El Capitan ", which can do more than a quintillion of calculations per second – 10 times more powerful than the colossal Sierra
The laboratory plans to invert the switch on El Capitan between 2021 and 2023.
In case you're wondering, supercomputers are all called natural monuments in California.
And not Jeremy Thomas, spokesperson for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, says that it is not planned to use the super computer for Bitcoin mining.
"Even though it would be great, the exploitation of bitcoins is definitely not part of our mission," Thomas said.
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