Sierra or ATS-2 is a
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a 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 instructions ...
built for the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...
for use by the
National Nuclear Security Administration as the second Advanced Technology System. It is primarily used for predictive applications in
stockpile stewardship
Stockpile stewardship refers to the United States program of reliability testing and maintenance of its nuclear weapons without the use of nuclear testing.
Because no new nuclear weapons have been developed by the United States since 1992, even i ...
, 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 topography, topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous.
The term (mountain top) is generally used ...
supercomputer built for the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Sierra system uses
IBM POWER9 CPUs in conjunction with
Nvidia 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. In 2019 Sierra was upgraded with
IBM Power System AC922 nodes.
has consistently appeared on the Top500 list, peaking a
#2 in November 2018
See also
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Trinity (supercomputer)
Trinity (or ATS-1) is a United States supercomputer built by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). The aim of the ASC program is to simulate, test, and maintain the United Sta ...
– ATS-1, the first Advanced Technology System
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OpenBMC
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