“Venado adds to our cutting-edge supercomputing that advances national security and basic research, and it will accelerate how we integrate artificial intelligence into meeting those challenges,” said Thom Mason, Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Interestingly, Venado incorporates NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips. These chips are a powerful combination of an Arm-based NVIDIA central processing unit and an NVIDIA Hopper architecture-based graphics processing unit. They are designed to meet the needs of high-performance computing and giant-scale AI applications.

Venado is now online

All of this hardware will give Venado a performance, surprisingly, of around ten exaFLOPS. An exaFlop is a measurement unit used to calculate the processing power of supercomputers. It indicates the number of floating-point operations a computer can perform per second (FLOPS).

For reference, one exaflop equals a quintillion (10^18) floating-point operations per second. Moreover, the new computer can perform all this computation for less energy than other high-performance microchips.

“Our supercomputing capabilities represent a critical component of how national laboratories tackle important problems,” said the deputy U.S. Department of Energy secretary David Turk.

“With its ability to incorporate artificial intelligence approaches, we are looking forward to seeing how the Venado system at Los Alamos can deliver new and meaningful results for areas of interest.”

LANL explains Venado also features HPE Cray EX, which reportedly gives the supercomputer a computing capacity of 2,560 direct, liquid-cooled Grace Hopper Superchips. The computer will have 920 NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchips, marking the first large-scale deployment of these chips in the United States.

The NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip consists of 144 Arm cores that can improve the performance of various High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

“As the first U.S. supercomputer powered by NVIDIA Grace Hopper, the Venado system delivers groundbreaking performance and energy efficiency to accelerate scientific discovery,” said Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA.

“Through our continued work with Los Alamos and HPE, Venado will be a magnificent scientific instrument for researchers to achieve breakthroughs in materials science, renewable energy, astrophysics, and more,” he added.

The supercomputer will greatly assist LANL research

Venado is designed to accelerate various scientific applications, including simulation, machine learning, scientific edge computing, and digital twin technologies. This will include material science research into density functional theory, which is believed to be crucial to understanding material properties at the atomic scale.

Venado will also help with energy research, such as digital twin modeling of power grids. Additionally, it will help stimulate the use of unmanned vehicles and lidar systems connected over 5G networks. This will reportedly form the foundation for using such technologies to fight wildfires more effectively.

“Powerful supercomputing with AI-driven capabilities will enable researchers to make high-impact breakthroughs and solve real-world problems in this next era of scientific discovery,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE.

“Los Alamos National Laboratory continues to demonstrate cutting-edge research and engineering achievements with industry-leading supercomputing. We are proud of our longstanding relationship with the Lab to build Venado and NVIDIA to deliver innovative AI solutions that will accelerate discoveries and make impactful contributions in fields like materials science and energy research,” she added.