Endowed with artificial intelligence, the Perlmutter supercomputer should help in the study of dark energy and the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe . His goal ? Help make the largest 3D map of the visible Universe.
The Perlmutter is one of the most powerful supercomputers equipped with AI . This was recently presented by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a high-performance computing center used by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on behalf of the Office of Science of the Department of Health. energy of the United States. Incidentally, the Perlmutter is the result of a collaboration between the companies Hewlett-Packard, AMD and Nvidia.
The supercomputer will aim to develop the most important 3D cartography of the visible Universe . For those responsible for the project, this will make it possible to study dark energy (or dark energy). Remember that this form of energy gives the possibility of explaining the expansion of the Universe. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will collect the data that the Perlmutter supercomputer will process. This is coupled to the Mayall telescope located near Tucson, Arizona (United States). However, its mission is to measure the light emitted by tens of millions of galaxies at crazy distances (12 billion light-years).
The Perlmutter contains 1535 nodes . Each of these nodes contains four Nvidia A100 GPUs and an AMD Epyc 7763 processor (64 cores). In total, the supercomputer delivers a power of four exaflops, or 4,000 petaflops. That's a lot more than the most powerful non-AI supercomputer. Indeed, the Fugaku at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe (Japan) scored "only" 415.5 petaflops in the Linpack performance test. Remember in passing that supercomputers using AI do not include the ranking of the best machines, this being reserved for those without AI.
According to the project leaders, the Perlmutter should be able to process a year's worth of DESI data in just a few days. With current systems, this type of operation would take several weeks or even months. However, you will still have to be patient. Indeed, the supercomputer is still in its development phase.
During this year it will be improved. More than 3,000 other nodes – this time comprising two AMD Epyc 7763 chips each – will be added to the machinery already in place. Finally, in addition to the study of dark energy and the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, the Perlmutter should also work on clean energies.
