NERSC RFP: 40 ExaFLOPS Mixed Precision Expected from Perlmutter AI Supercomputer Successor

Last August, NERSC (the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced its intent to commission “NERSC-10,” a next-generation supercomputer to be delivered “in the 2026 timeframe” for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research community. The system will succeed Perlmutter, the 6,000 NVIDIA GPU-powered (with AMD CPUs), 4-exaFLOPS […]

TACC: Simulation Reveals Secrets of Exotic Electrons

March 22, 2023 — The Texas Advanced Computing Center has announced that simulations on TACC’s Frontera supercomputer have helped scientists map for the first time the conditions that characterize exotic electrons, called polarons, in 2D materials, the thinnest materials ever been made. “A new leaf has turned in scientists’ hunt for developing cutting-edge materials used in […]

DOE Awards 18M HPC Node Hours to 45 ASCR Projects, Including Access to Perlmutter, Polaris and Frontier

June 29, 2022 – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 18 million node-hours have been awarded to 45 scientific projects under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program. The projects, with applications ranging from advanced energy systems to climate change to cancer research, will use DOE supercomputers with the goal of uncovering […]

Double-precision CPUs vs. Single-precision GPUs; HPL vs. HPL-AI HPC Benchmarks; Traditional vs. AI Supercomputers

If you’ve wondered why GPUs are faster than CPUs, in part it’s because GPUs are asked to do less – or, to be more precise, to be less precise. Next question: So if GPUs are faster than CPUs, why aren’t GPUs  the mainstream, baseline processor used in HPC server clusters? Again, in part it gets […]

ALCF Developer Session: Inside the NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU in ThetaGPU and Perlmutter

On Wednesday, July 28 at 11 am CT, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility will present a developer session focused on utilization of the Nvidia Ampere A100 GPU in ALCF’s ThetaGPU and NERSC’s Perlmutter supercomputers. Registration is here. The Ampere A100 GPU builds on the performance of the NVIDIA V100 GPU and includes new features for […]

HPE at ISC: ‘Perform Like a Supercomputer, Run Like a Cloud’

Since we last saw HPE at ISC a year ago, the company embarked on a strong run of success in HPC and supercomputing – successes the company will no doubt be happy to discuss at virtual ISC 2021. This being the year of exascale, HPE is likely to put toward the top of its list […]

6,000 GPUs: Perlmutter to Deliver 4 Exaflops, Top Spot in AI Supercomputing

The U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center today unveiled the Perlmutter HPC system, a beast of a machine powered by 6,159 Nvidia A100 GPUs and delivering 4 exaflops of mixed precision performance. Perlmutter is based on the HPE Cray Shasta platform, including Slingshot interconnect, a heterogeneous system with both GPU-accelerated and CPU-only nodes. The system […]

Perlmutter supercomputer to include more than 6000 NVIDIA A100 processors

NERSC is among the early adopters of the new NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU processor announced by NVIDIA this week. More than 6,000 of the A100 chips will be included in NERSC’s next-generation Perlmutter system, which is based on an HPE Cray Shasta supercomputer that will be deployed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory later this year. “Nearly half of the workload running at NERSC is poised to take advantage of GPU acceleration, and NERSC, HPE, and NVIDIA have been working together over the last two years to help the scientific community prepare to leverage GPUs for a broad range of research workloads.”

NERSC Finalizes Contract for Perlmutter Supercomputer

NERSC has moved another step closer to making Perlmutter — its next-generation GPU-accelerated supercomputer — available to the science community in 2020. In mid-April, NERSC finalized its contract with Cray — which was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in September 2019 — for the new system, a Cray Shasta supercomputer that will feature 24 […]

NERSC Rolls Out New Community File System for Next-Gen HPC

NERSC recently unveiled their new Community File System (CFS), a long-term data storage tier developed in collaboration with IBM that is optimized for capacity and manageability. “In the next few years, the explosive growth in data coming from exascale simulations and next-generation experimental detectors will enable new data-driven science across virtually every domain. At the same time, new nonvolatile storage technologies are entering the market in volume and upending long-held principles used to design the storage hierarchy.”