Lawrence Livermore Labs turns on the Sierra supercomputer: Photos



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Covering 7,000 square feet and comprising 240 computer bays and 4,320 nodes, a government-clbadified lab contains 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.

To power such a mbadive electronic brain, it takes about 11 to 12 megawatts of energy, about the equivalent of what it takes to power 12,000 homes – a level of energy consumption. 39 energy relatively energy efficient, according to Sierra's creators.

At present, Sierra is collaborating with medical laboratories to help develop cancer treatments and study traumatic brain injuries before they go to clbadified jobs.

Soon nuclear

Many of the 4,000 nuclear weapons in the government stock 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.

Sierra supercomputer
Rosalie Chan

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 President of technical computer software at IBM. "Now, these systems will make the kind of revolutionary science that is ubiquitous right now."

The laboratory has also installed another new supercomputer called Lbaden, which will focus on unclbadified work such as anticancer drug discovery, traumatic brain injury research, and earthquake and climate studies.

Sierra is not the last supercomputer that the lab will build. They are already planning the next one: "El Capitan", which can do more than a quintillion calculations per second – 10 times more powerful than the colossal Sierra.

The laboratory plans to reverse the switch on El Capitan between 2021 and 2023.

In case you're wondering, supercomputers are all called natural California sites.

And no, Jeremy Thomas, spokesman for Lawrence Livermore's National Laboratories, states that "it is not planned to use the Sierra supercomputer for the exploitation of bitcoin.

"Even though it would probably be great, bitcoin mining is definitely not part of our mission," said Thomas.

Sierra supercomputer
Rosalie Chan

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