NVIDIA Corp. has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to deliver a NVIDIA Grace central processing unit system to Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The newly designed Venado system will support modeling, simulations and data analysis for the laboratory’s various research initiatives and projects, the Los Alamos, New Mexico-based team said Monday.
“This advanced system pushes new technical boundaries, enabling Los Alamos researchers and collaborators to make new discoveries, benefiting the nation and society as a whole,” commented Irene Qualters, associate Laboratory director for simulation and computation.
Through the Venado system co-creation, NVIDIA, HPE and Los Alamos are aiming to produce a software environment that sustains developer output and customizable, portable parallel programming models. Venado is also slated to help grow an Arm-powered high performance computing and artificial intelligence development ecosystem.
HPE serves as the system provider, with Venado constructed on the HPE Shasta system. It is named after Venado Peak, a mountain in the Taos vicinity. Venado is build to withstand and operate heterogeneous task orders such as artificial intelligence-based materials science, energy research and modeling and simulation of unmanned vehicles. The latter function could contribute to anti-wildfire efforts.
According to Gary Grider, division leader of high performance computing at Los Alamos, these various capabilities are made possible by the new system’s Grace CPU Superchip nodes and Grace Hopper Superchip nodes.
Venado is scheduled for completion in 2023. It will succeed the Los Alamos facilities’ current Chicoma supercomputer, an HPE Olympus system that is seen as a bridge to the more powerful Venado. The new system’s installation will be followed by a collaborative deployment of computing, memory and software technologies with Venado as a launching pad.
The Venado announcement follows NVIDIA’s April release of a program that realizes scientific digital twins via a neural network framework and 3D virtual world simulation technology. The Venado system will likewise offer digital twin capabilities.
