Sierra or ATS-2 is a
supercomputer built for the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 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 physics, nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the Stockpil ...
as the second Advanced Technology System. It is primarily used for predictive applications in
stockpile stewardship, helping to assure the safety, reliability and effectiveness of the United States' nuclear weapons.
Sierra is very similar in architecture to the
Summit supercomputer built for the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research an ...
. The Sierra system uses
IBM 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 ...
CPUs in conjunction with
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
Tesla V100 GPUs.
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
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 use ...
. In 2019 Sierra was upgraded with
IBM Power System
Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its Power processors. It was created in 2008 as a merger of the System p and System i product lines.
History
IBM had two distinct POWER- and PowerPC-based hardware lin ...
AC922 nodes.
has consistently appeared on the Top500 list, peaking a
#2 in November 2018
See also
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Trinity (supercomputer) – ATS-1, the first Advanced Technology System
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OpenBMC
The OpenBMC project is a Linux Foundation collaborative open-source project whose goal is to produce an open source implementation of the Baseboard Management Controllers (BMC) Firmware Stack. OpenBMC is a Linux distribution for BMCs meant to w ...
References
External links
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{{Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, state=autocollapse
GPGPU supercomputers
IBM supercomputers
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
NNSA Advanced Technology Systems
Petascale computers