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- The third most powerful supercomputer in the world has been completed and unveiled: the Sierra.
- This supercomputer, which can do 125 quadrillion calculations in a second, will be used to create simulations that can be tested.
- The Sierra is currently being used for scientific work, such as predicting the effects of cancer and mapping traumatic brain injury.
Covering 7,000 square feet and 240 computing racks and 4,320 nodes, a classified government lab holds what looks like a futuristic mini city 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 its home, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, after four years in the making.
At its peak, Sierra can do 125 quadrillion calculations in a second. Its simulations are 100,000 times more than normal desktop computer can make. The only two supercomputers are China's Sunway Taihulight in second place and IBM's Summit in first.
"It would take 10 years to do this machine can do in one second," said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of accelerated computing at NVIDIA.
Powering such a massive electronic brain takes about 11 to 12 megawatts of energy, roughly the equivalent of what's needed to power 12,000 homes – a relative energy efficient level of energy consumption, according to Sierra's creators.
Right now, Sierra is partnering with medical labs to help you develop cancer treatments and study traumatic brain injury.
Going nuclear soon
Many of the 4,000 nuclear weapons in the stockpile are aging. 2019, it will focus on top secret government activities and it will be used to test the safety and reliability of these weapons, without setting the weapons themselves and endangering people.
This test can be used to simulate the effects of cancer, earthquakes and more. In other words, it can answer questions in 3D.
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The lab and the Department of Energy worked with IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox on this project. Talks for Sierra began in 2012, and in 2014 the project took off. Now, it's six times more powerful than its predecessor, Sequoia.
What makes the Sierra is better than the NVLink, which connects to more powerful memory.
"What's most fascinating is the scale of what it can do and the nature of the system that opens itself to the next generation workload," said Akhtar Ali, VP of technical computing software at IBM. "Now these systems will be the kind of breakthrough science that's pervasive right now.
Lassen, who will focus on unclassified work like speeding cancer drug discovery, research in traumatic brain injury, and studying earthquakes and the climate.
Sierra's not the last supercomputer the lab will build. They are already planning the next one: "El Capitan," which can do more than quintillion calculations per second – 10 times more powerful than the colossal Sierra.
The lab expects to flip the switch on El Capitan sometime in the 2021 to 2023 time frame.
In case you're wondering, the supercomputers are named after natural landmarks in California.
And no, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories spokesperson Jeremy Thomas says, there are no plans to use the Sierra supercomputer for bitcoin mining.
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