Jan. 10, 2022 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers and a multi-institutional team of scientists have developed a highly detailed, machine learning-backed multiscale model revealing the importance of lipids to the signaling dynamics of RAS, a family of proteins whose mutations are linked to numerous cancers. The team simulated a one micron-by-one micron patch on […]
At SC20: Fugaku Extends HPC Top500 Lead, Benchmarks 2 ExaFLOPS on HPC-AI; Summit, Sierra Nos. 2 and 3; China at Nos. 4 and 6
November 16, 2020 by
The Arm-based Fugaku supercomputer, residing at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Japan, solidified the lead it seized in June atop the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Announced today at virtual SC20, the 56th edition of the bi-annual list reflects a “flattening performance growth curve,” according to the organizations, which said […]
Where Have You Gone, IBM?
October 15, 2020 by
The company that built the world’s nos. 2 and 3 most powerful supercomputers is to all appearances backing away from the supercomputer systems business. IBM, whose Summit and Sierra CORAL-1 systems set the global standard for pre-exascale supercomputing, failed to win any of the three exascale contracts, and since then IBM has seemingly withdrawn from the HPC systems field. This has been widely discussed within the HPC community for at least the last 18 months. In fact, an industry analyst told us that as long ago as the annual ISC Conference in Frankfurt four years ago, he was shocked when IBM told him the company was no longer interested in the HPC business per se….
Cerebras 1.2 Trillion Chip Integrated with LLNL’s Lassen System for AI Research
August 19, 2020 by
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and AI company Cerebras Systems today announced the integration of the 1.2-trillion Cerebras’ Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) chip into the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) 23-petaflop Lassen supercomputer. The pairing of Lassen’s simulation capability with Cerebras’ machine learning compute system, along with the CS-1 accelerator system that houses the chip, […]
How the Results of Summit and Sierra are Influencing Exascale
September 25, 2019 by
Al Geist from ORNL gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. “Two DOE national laboratories are now home to the fastest supercomputers in the world, according to the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems. The IBM Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently ranked number one, while Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s IBM Sierra system has climbed to the number two spot.”
Video: Sierra – Science Unleashed
February 27, 2019 by
Rob Neely from LLNL gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. “This talk will give an overview of the Sierra supercomputer and some of the early science results it has enabled. Sierra is an IBM system harnessing the power of over 17,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs recently deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is currently ranked as the #2 system on the Top500. Before being turned over for use in the classified mission, Sierra spent months in an “open science campaign” where we got an early glimpse at some of the truly game-changing science this system will unleash – selected results of which will be presented.”
Interview: Why HPC is the Right Tool for Physics
February 14, 2019 by
Over at the SC19 Blog, Charity Plata continues the HPC is Now series of interviews with Enrico Rinaldi, a physicist and special postdoctoral fellow with the Riken BNL Research Center. This month, Rinaldi discusses why HPC is the right tool for physics and shares the best formula for garnering a Gordon Bell Award nomination. “Sierra and Summit are incredible machines, and we were lucky to be among the first teams to use them to produce new scientific results. The impact on my lattice QCD research was tremendous, as demonstrated by the Gordon Bell paper submission.”
LLNL Unveils NNSA’s Sierra, World’s Third Fastest Supercomputer
October 26, 2018 by
Today LLNL unveiled Sierra, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, at a dedication ceremony to celebrate the system’s completion. “The next frontier of supercomputing lies in artificial intelligence,” said John Kelly, senior vice president, Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research. “IBM’s decades-long partnership with LLNL has allowed us to build Sierra from the ground up with the unique design and architecture needed for applying AI to massive data sets. The tremendous insights researchers are seeing will only accelerate high performance computing for research and business.”
NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs Accelerate World’s Fastest Supercomputers
June 25, 2018 by
Today NVIDIA is highlighting news that the world’s top AI supercomputers on the TOP500 are all powered by the company’s Tensor Core GPUs. The new “AI supercomputers” on the list include Summit and Sierra in the USA and the ABCI machine in Japan. “The new TOP500 list clearly shows that GPUs are the path forward for supercomputing in an era when Moore’s Law has ended,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of accelerated computing at NVIDIA.
Video: IBM Brings NVIDIA Volta to Supercharge Discoveries
March 30, 2018 by
In this video from GTC 2018, Adel El-Hallak from IBM describes how IBM and NVIDIA are partnering to build the largest supercomputers in the world to enable data scientists and application developers to not be limited to any device memory. Between IBM and NVIDIA, you can capitalize on the Volta 32GB memory and the entire system as a whole.
