Sierra or ATS-2 is a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

built for the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...

for use by the

National Nuclear Security Administration The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is a United States federal agency responsible for safeguarding national security through the military application of nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, and ef ...

as the second Advanced Technology System. It is primarily used for predictive applications in nuclear weapon

stockpile stewardship Stockpile stewardship refers to the United States program of reliability testing, viability, and the maintenance of its nuclear weapons without the use of nuclear testing. Because no new nuclear weapons have been developed by the United States si ...

, helping to assure the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of the United States' nuclear weapons. Sierra is very similar in architecture to the

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...

supercomputer built for the

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...

. The nodes in Sierra are Witherspoon IBM S922LC

OpenPOWER The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA-based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM's focus is to open up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, such ...

servers with two GPUs per CPU and four GPUs per node. These nodes are connected with EDR

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

. In 2019 Sierra was upgraded with IBM Power System AC922 nodes. Sierra is composed of 4,474 nodes, 4,284 of which are compute nodes. Each node has 256GB of RAM, 44

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

POWER9 POWER9 is a family of superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessors produced by IBM, based on the Power ISA. It was announced in August 2016. The POWER9-based processors are being manufactured using a 14 nm FinFET process, in ...

cores spread across two physical sockets, and Four

Nvidia Tesla Nvidia Tesla is the former name for a line of products developed by Nvidia targeted at stream processing or GPGPU, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began us ...

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. Sierra has consistently appeared on the

Top500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list, peaking at second place in November 2018. As of November 2023, it is in tenth place.https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2023/11/ Only 4.6 petaflops of its performance come from its CPUs, with the large majority (120.9 petaflops) coming from the Tesla GPUs.

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* {{Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, state=autocollapse GPGPU supercomputers IBM supercomputers Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory NNSA Advanced Technology Systems Petascale computers

See also

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External links