The US Department of Energy is set to debut its Doudna supercomputer, constructed by Dell Technologies and powered by Nvidia's Vera-Rubin accelerators. This move represents a departure from previous collaborations with Cray and AMD. The system, which aims for a 10x increase in scientific output compared to its predecessor, Perlmutter, will consume 2-3 times the power. Despite promising power efficiency, concerns arise regarding Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra chips potentially sacrificing double-precision performance for AI workloads. Thus, while the Doudna can multitask across HPC and AI, its capacity for high-precision scientific computations remains ambiguous.
The Doudna system, funded by the US DOE and powered by Nvidia, promises up to a 10x increase in scientific output, but its GPU architecture may affect double precision performance.
Nvidia's next-gen Vera-Rubin accelerators deviate from historical metrics of double-precision performance, which raises questions about their effectiveness for scientific computing workloads.
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