Los Alamos supercomputer will use Nvidia’s Grace Hopper processors

Nvidia said that a new supercomputer being made by the Los Alamos National Laboratory will use the chipmaker’s Grace and Grace Hopper superchips.

The central processing units (CPUs) will be part of a HPE Cray EX supercomputer dubbed the Venado. The chips are also being used by other computer makers to build the next generation of servers turbocharging AI and HPC workloads for the exascale era, Nvidia said.

Atos, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, HPE, Inspur, Lenovo and Supermicro are planning to deploy
servers built with the Grace and Grace Hopper CPUs.

All these new systems benefit from the just-announced Grace and Grace Hopper designs in the Nvidia HGX platform, which provide manufacturers the blueprints needed to build systems that offer high performance and twice the memory bandwidth and energy efficiency of today’s leading data center CPU.

“As supercomputing enters the era of exascale AI, Nvidia is teaming up with our [hardware] partners
to enable researchers to tackle massive challenges previously out of reach,” said Ian Buck, vice
president of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia, in a statement. “Across climate science, energy research, space
exploration, digital biology, quantum computing and more, the Nvidia Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip form the foundation of the world’s most advanced platform for HPC and AI.”

Supercomputing centers in the U.S. and Europe will be among the first with systems featuring the superchips.

Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Venado will be the first system in the U.S. to be powered by Nvidia Grace CPU technology. The Venado is a heterogeneous system that will feature a mix of Grace CPU superchip nodes and Grace Hopper superchip nodes for a wide and emerging set of applications. When completed, the system is expected to exceed 10 exaflops of AI performance.

“By equipping LANL’s researchers with the performance of Nvidia Grace Hopper, Venado will continue this laboratory’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of scientific breakthroughs,” said Irene Qualters, associate director for Simulation and Computation at LANL, in a statement. “Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform and expansive ecosystem are removing performance barriers, allowing LANL to make new discoveries that will benefit the nation and society as a whole.”

Alps, the Swiss National Computing Center’s new system, also to be built by HPE using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, will use the Grace CPU Superchip to enable breakthrough research in a wide range of fields. It will serve as a general-purpose system open to the research community in Switzerland, as well as the rest of the world.

The Nvidia Grace CPU Superchip features two Arm-based CPUs, connected coherently through the high-bandwidth, low-latency, low-power Nvidia NVLink-C2C interconnect. This design features up to 144 high-performance Arm Neoverse cores with scalable vector extensions and a 1 terabyte-per-second memory subsystem.

The Grace CPU Superchip interfaces with the latest PCIe Gen5 protocol to enable maximum connectivity with the highest-performing GPUs, as well as with Nvidia ConnectX-7 smart network interface cards and Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs for secure HPC and AI workloads.

The Grace Hopper Superchip pairs an Nvidia Hopper GPU with an Nvidia Grace CPU in an integrated module connected with NVLink-C2C to address HPC and giant-scale AI applications.