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New AI supercomputer will help create the largest-ever 3D map of the universe

 Nvidia launches new supercomputer with monster AI performance. Perlmutter could complete tasks in days that would normally take months.


                            Perlmutter(left) was named after the astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter(right)

 The newest big-name supercomputer might help solve some of astrophysics' most important questions. Nvidia has fired up a new supercomputer said to be the fastest in the world for AI workloads at the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center (NERSC) in California. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has officially dedicated Perlmutter, billed as one of the fastest supercomputers for AI, and it will start by helping to build the largest-ever 3D map of the visible universe to study the dark energy accelerating the cosmos' expansion.

 The supercomputer is named after astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter and will initially be tasked with building the most ambitious 3D map of the universe ever seen, utilizing the 6,000+ Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs on board.

In its current state, Perlmutter is capable of delivering almost four exaFLOPS of AI performance, which Nvidia says makes it “the fastest system on the planet on 16- and 32-bit mixed-precision math AI uses”. Its performance will be bolstered further as part of “phase two”, with the introduction of a second tranche of CPU cores.

FEATURES OF PERLMUTTER:

lPerlmutter includes 1,536 nodes that each have a 64-core Epyc 7763 processor and four NVIDIA A100 GPUs

l A system with almost four exaflops of performance (plus 35 petabytes of storage) when handling AI tasks, and dramatically reduced calculation times.

lA second phase due later in 2021 will add 3,072 CPU-only nodes that each have dual Epyc 7763 chips.

 The map isn't the only project on deck. Perlmutter will also study atomic interactions to foster clean energy tech like biofuels . Once the system is complete, it is expected to fall within the top five supercomputers in the Top 500 rankings, which assesses overall performance using the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.

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