Lawrence Livermore National Lab's New Powerful Supercomputer

LIVERMORE – Suddenly, your smart phone feels really stupid.

Get acquainted with Sierra, Lawrence Livermore National Lab's new supercomputer capable of performing 125 quadrillions of calculations per second (125 followed by 15 zeros) and protect the nuclear stock of our country. .

To match this, every inhabitant of the Earth should perform a calculation every second, 24 hours a day – for a whole year.

Unveiled Friday, 150 million US dollars give the United States the right to boast of the top three positions in the world supercomputing. The new machine ranks behind the top of the Oak Ridge National Lab and the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight.

She is not only powerful, she has a stunning memory. There is enough storage space for every written work of humanity, in all languages ​​- twice.

"But it's not its size or rank, it's the science that it's going to support," said Bronis of Supinski, Livermore Computering's leading technology. Officer and Head of Advanced Technology Systems at Livermore Laboratory.

Sierra was designed late 2012 in a hotel room near the airport O. Hare Chicago, as part of a collaboration between the Ministry of Energy. United States, Livermore, Oak Ridge and Argonne. However, during its four years of construction, the project faced logistical problems, technical challenges and a major surprise: the rising cost of memory, linked to global demand for smart phones. Prices have doubled in the last three months of 2016, said Supinski. After negotiations, IBM changed its network to compensate, while maintaining the project budget.

Despite our progress, the National Security Agency and the Ministry of Energy warned that China was poised to overtake America in high performance computing. 19659002] Built by IBM and NVIDIA, Sierra is designed to support the country's three nuclear safety laboratories: Lawrence Livermore, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This support is essential. As North Korea continues its research on nuclear weapons technologies, our system is aging. Even a bike is not designed to remain idle for decades and can still take action without notice. But that's what you expect from a nuclear weapon.

For example, how would a capillary crack affect the life of a nuclear warhead? Without detonation, Sierra helps us discover it. It can process the data needed to create a 3D image, by modeling and simulating an increasing fracture of the deadly device.

"It allows simulations that are 100,000 times more realistic than on a desktop computer," said Fred Streitz, director of the Lab. Scientific Informatics Research Institute

Bruce Hendrickson, Assistant Director of Laboratory Computing, said the project had been a long time coming. He added that the new supercomputer would open up new scientific possibilities for all projects, be they mbadive or tiny.

"To speak of it as a computer, is to say that the roof of the Sistine Chapel is covered with paint," Hendrickson said. "A better badogy would be the Hubble Space Telescope."

But Sierra is less beautiful than its name, with flashing green lights instead of romantic peaks. The cooling fans emit a loud roar from its units the size of a black refrigerator, packaged in an area of ​​6,000 square feet without a window – the size of two tennis courts – inside of 39, an indeterminate tanned building.

Weighing up to 40 elephants, its weight required that the soil be structurally strengthened. It is also protected against earthquakes, sitting on plates that move in response to earthquakes. It consumes 12 million watts of energy, or 9,000 homes, and heats up so much that it must be cooled not by fans, but by 3,500 gallons of water circulating every minute.

The local Sierra is protected very strictly. First of all, you have to cross the notorious laboratory space and then give a secret code to the door. Friday's wide-eyed visitors were politely gathered in a small group and could only watch from their feet.

Supercomputers have come a long way since the Kansas City National Security Campus entered history in 1964 by installing a brand new hard drive storing data worth 95,000 punch cards, about 7.6 MB.

Sierra is powerful because it is a so-called "heterogeneous" supercomputer, capable of moving data between a broadband connection connecting its central processing units (UC). and graphics processing units (GPUs).

Supercomputers may seem superfluous in the age of cloud computing and large data centers. But the most difficult computer problems demand the speed of giant machines – and the country's leaders do not want to trust our best data for private business ventures, no matter what they promise to protect, Supinski said. .

Supercomputers can also science of help, medicine, energy and climate change. Its simulations allow scientists to pursue research on genetics, cellular structure and atmospheric fluctuations that were previously impossible or impossible.

Despite all its splendor, Sierra is short-lived, with a very good life span of five or six years, de Supinski said.