In the World of Supercomputers...

There is much going on. Los Alamos to power up supercomputer using all-Nvidia CPU, GPU Superchips

While looking for an article at The Register to post in a comment over at SiGraybeard's site I tripped over a bit of news on supercomputing.

Before getting started a couple of definitions from Nvidia. Nvidia’s Grace CPU-only Superchip is 144 cores of an ARM-compatible CPU and a total of 1 terabyte of DRAM. The Grace-Hopper Superchip is 72 cores of Grace CPU, 72 cores of H100 GPU with 512 gigabytes of DRAM and 80 gigabytes of video memory. All of this makes use of Nvidia's 900 gigabit per second NVVLink-C2C interconnect bus. The Grace and the Grace-Hopper chips were announced in the spring.

All of that tech is being used by Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build the Venado supercomputer.

Venado is hoped to be the first in a wave of high-performance computers that use an all-Nvidia architecture, in this case using Grace-Hopper Superchips that combine CPU and GPU dies, and Grace CPU-only Superchips.

This supercomputer "will be the first system deployed not just with Grace-Hopper in terms of the converged Superchip but it’ll also have a cluster of Grace CPU-only Superchip modules,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s head of datacenter product marketing for HPC, AI, and Magnum IO, said during an Nvidia press conference ahead of ISC.

Not to be outdone by upstart Americans, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is building the Alps System. Alps will be using some of Nvidia's tech, but I don't think it is the Grace/Grace-Hopper architecture.

Planned to come online in 2023, the “Alps” system infrastructure will replace CSCS’s existing Piz Daint supercomputer and serve as a general-purpose system open to the broad community of researchers in Switzerland and the rest of the world.

All of this is off-topic for this blog, but appeals to the computer nerd that I was in my youth.

For those of you who do not know who Grace Hopper was, see this link. She was a Read Admiral in the Naval Reserve, she got her PhD. in Mathematics in 1934, and was responsible for the phrase "debugging a computer" (after she found a moth between the reeds of a relay in the The Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. (My link has a picture of the log-book page and the bug. "First actual case of a bug being found.") There is an AEGIS Class Guided Missile Destroyer named in her honor, and more.

This was the article I did post at SiGraybeard, but there are so many more at The Register that deal with the Reg Standards Soviet! All this was in response to an article at Accuweather that measured an asteroid in giraffe's. (And unlike most news organizations, The Register has a genuine sense of humor!)