July 13, 2019 Berkeley / CA / USA – View of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) at UC Berkeley is a national US laboratory that conducts scientific research on behalf of the Department of Energy
Various photography / istockphoto
By
Brandi Vincent
Perlmutter, a next-generation supercomputer believed to run among the world’s most powerful, goes online at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The first of a two-phase installation began this week with development of the advanced system that the Department of Energy’s NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) will study complex scientific phenomena and even map the universe.
« We will be able to use the system from the start, » said Dion Harris, Nvidia’s leader technical accelerated computing product marketing manager, reporters at a press conference to get a preview of the new machine. « We are very excited, not only with the performance of the system, but also with the applications and all the science that will make it possible. »
Perlmutter was developed with Nvidia technology and is based on one provided by HPE Cray Platform that combines both nodes with an accelerated graphics processing unit and nodes with only a central processing unit. It was developed for data-centric computing and artificial intelligence workflows. NERSC recently confirmed that the planned performance is roughly three to four times that of the centre’s current supercomputer system, Cori. Nations are now working to move from the petascale era of computing – where the fastest supercomputers can perform a trillion operations per second – to the new and next exascale era. Exascale systems are about 1,000 times more powerful than petascale supercomputers and can perform a billion billion operations per second.
“Today we celebrate the unveiling of the first phase, which is essentially the GPU-accelerated part . Based on this first phase, we expect approximately 120 petaflops with double the precision of HPC performance, ”said Harris. « That would put us roughly in the top 5 of the existing Top500 list as it relates today. »
The next phase, in which the CPU-only nodes will be added, should take place this year. If Perlmutter is fully functional with the more than 6,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, Perlmutter can deliver around four exaflops of performance. According to Nvidia, it will be « the fastest on the planet » to perform the 16- and 32-bit mixed-phase precision math used for some high-performance AI applications.
In addition to the in-house experiments in the California lab Energy’s NERSC also provides computing time for interested researchers to run their projects on the sophisticated system. « Mother of pearl is really seen as a kind of test bed for the exascale program at DOE, » Harris noted during the call .
A blog post he wrote for Nvidia and published on Thursday confirms that the supercomputer will help compile the « largest 3D map of the visible universe to date » in a planned pursuit. Essentially, Perlmutter processes data from a cosmic camera – the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The tool’s maps are designed to help understand dark energy, or what Harris called « the mysterious physics behind the accelerated expansion of the universe ».
This phenomenon, dark energy, was largely brought about by the 2011 Nobel Prize excellent work discovered by the namesake of the new machine, Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist who is still at the Berkeley Lab. A mural on the machine is supposed to pay tribute to him and his team.
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