Lawrence Livermore National Lab's powerful new supercomputer

LIVERMORE – Suddenly, your smart phone feels really stupid.

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

To match this, every person on Earth should perform a calculation every second, 24 hours a day – for a whole year.

Inaugurated Friday, Sierra, with $ 150 million, gives the United States the right to boast two of the top three places in the world supercomputer. The new machine ranks behind the top of the Oak Ridge National Lab and the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight.

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

"But it's not the size or the rank, it's the science he will support," said Bronis of Supinski, chief technology officer at Livermore Computering and head of Livermore Lab's advanced technology systems.

Sierra was designed late 2012 in a hotel room near Chicago O'Hare Airport, as part of a collaboration between the US Department of Energy, 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 by high performance computing.

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.

And 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, to model and simulate a growing fracture in the deadly device.

"This allows simulations that are 100,000 times more realistic than on a desktop," said Fred Streitz, director of the laboratory's Institute for Scientific Research.

Bruce Hendrickson, assistant director of laboratory computing, said the project has been long in coming. He added that the new supercomputer would open up new scientific possibilities for any project, be it massive or tiny.

"Talking about this as a computer, that is, the roof of the Sistine Chapel is covered with paint," Hendrickson said. "A better analogy 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 imposed a structural reinforcement of the soil. It is also protected against earthquakes, sitting on plates that move in response to earthquakes. It consumes 12 million watts of electricity, the equivalent of 9,000 homes – and heats up so much that it must be cooled not by fans, but by 3,500 gallons of water in circulation every minute.

Sierra's room is protected by enhanced security. 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 assembled into a tight group and could only watch from yards away.

Supercomputers have come a long way since the Kansas City National Security Campus entered history in 1964 by installing a brand new disk drive capable of storing 95,000 punch cards, or about 7.6 megabytes.

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

Supercomputers may seem superfluous in the era of cloud computing and gigantic data centers. But the most difficult computer problems demand the speed of giant machines – and the country's leaders are unwilling to trust our best data to private business enterprises, no matter what they promise to protect, Supinski said.

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

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