Next-Generation Super Computer Coming to the Berkeley National Lab

The Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that it is building a next-generation, pre-exascale supercomputer. The computer will be located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center, and will be named “Perlmutter” after Berkeley Lab’s Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter. The Perlmutter computer is the first of its kind designed to meet the needs of large-scale simulations as well as data analysis from experimental and observational facilities

As the DOE explained in a recent statement regarding the computer, the Perlmutter is a heterogeneous system comprising both CPU-only and GPU-accelerated cabinets. It will include a number of innovations designed to meet the diverse computational and data analysis needs of NERSC’s user base and speed their scientific productivity. These include a new Cray system interconnect that is designed for data-centric computing,  NVIDIA GPUs with new Tensor Core technology, direct liquid cooling, and an all-flash scratch filesystem which will move data at a rate of more than 4 terabytes/sec.

The NERSC, located at the Berkely Lab is the mission high performance computing facility for the DOE Office of Science. It supports more than 7,000 scientists and 600 projects annually.

For more information about the NERSC, click here: https://www.lbl.gov/