Sierra or ATS-2 is a supercomputer built for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for use by the National Nuclear Security Administration as the second Advanced Technology System. It is primarily used for predictive applications in nuclear weapon stockpile stewardship, helping to assure the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of the United States' nuclear weapons.
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| Active | Since 2018[1] |
|---|---|
| Operators | National Nuclear Security Administration |
| Location | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory |
| Architecture | IBM POWER9 CPUs Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs Mellanox EDR InfiniBand[2] |
| Power | 11 MW |
| Memory | 2–2.4 PiB[1] |
| Speed | 125 petaflops (peak)[2] |
| Ranking | TOP500: 10 |
| Purpose | Nuclear weapon simulations[3] |
| Website | hpc |
Sierra is very similar in architecture to the Summit supercomputer built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The nodes in Sierra are Witherspoon IBM S922LC OpenPOWER servers with two GPUs per CPU and four GPUs per node. These nodes are connected with EDR InfiniBand. In 2019 Sierra was upgraded with IBM Power System AC922 nodes.[4][5]
Sierra is composed of 4,474 nodes, 4,284 of which are compute nodes. Each node has 256GB of RAM, 44 IBM POWER9 cores spread across two physical sockets, and Four Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs, each providing 16GB of VRAM. This gives the complete system 8,948 CPUs, 17,896 GPUs, 1.14 PB of RAM, and 286 TB of VRAM.[6]
Sierra has consistently appeared on the Top500 list, peaking at #2 in November 2018, at #6 on the June 2023 Top500 list. and at #10 on the November 2023 Top500 list. Only 4.6 petaflops of its performance come from its CPUs, with the large majority (120.9 petaflops) coming from the Tesla GPUs.[6]
See also edit
- Trinity (supercomputer) – ATS-1, the first Advanced Technology System
- OpenBMC
References edit
- ^ a b Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2017-10-05). "The Clever Machinations Of Livermore's Sierra Supercomputer". The Next Platform.
- ^ a b "Installation of Sierra Supercomputer Steams Along at LLNL". HPCwire. 2017-11-20.
- ^ Smith, Ryan (2014-11-17). "NVIDIA Volta, IBM POWER9 Land Contracts For New US Government Supercomputers". AnandTech.
- ^ "Sierra - IBM Power System AC922, IBM POWER9 22C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband | TOP500". www.top500.org. Retrieved 2020-12-15.
- ^ "IBM Power System AC922 - Details". www.ibm.com. Retrieved 2020-12-15.
- ^ a b "Sierra | HPC @ LLNL". hpc.llnl.gov. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
External links edit
- "America's nuclear arsenal relies on this brand-new supercomputer". Verge Science. November 20, 2018.