Nvidia supercomputers: new collegiate, research systems come online

Los Alamos National Lab launches Venado supercomputer

Nvidia-powered supercomputers are starting to make their presence felt in the research sector, starting with Venado at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. Venado is built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Cray EX supercomputer division and has a total of 2,560 direct, liquid-cooled Grace Hopper Superchips. It also has 920 Grace CPU chips.

The Grace Hopper chips with a combination of an Arm CPU with 144 cores (dubbed Grace) and the H200 GPU. The Grace CPU chips are without a GPU added.

Venado is the first large-scale system deployed in the U.S. with Nvidia Grace CPU superchips. LANL claims that it can top out at 10 exaFLOPs of performance, well ahead of the current top supercomputer in the world, the AMD-powered Frontier. However, the Venado benchmark is at FP8 while Frontier is benchmarked at FP64, so it’s not a true apples to apples comparison.

Atos brand Eviden delivers supercomputer to French agency

Across the Atlantic, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Atos’s HPC brand Eviden announced the delivery of a new EXA1 HE (high efficiency) supercomputer to CEA. The computer is based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 technology with 477 Grace Hopper superchips.

Last month, Eviden was selected to upgrade the capacity of the Zay supercomputer at the National Center for Scientific Research by providing 1,456 Nvidia H100 GPUs to increase the peak computing power from 36.85 petaflops to 125.9 petaflops.