"Sierra was conceived in a Chicago hotel conference room more than a decade ago, at a technical discussion for officials from America's national labs. The ultimate designer baby, Sierra was assembled from thousands of IBM Power9 CPUs and Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs-a daring, offbeat architecture for Livermore at the time."
"Like other supercomputers, Sierra was girthy. She was composed of thousands of compute nodes, stored one on top of another in racks-basically cabinets-that held up her processing innards. She had 240 of these racks, spread across roughly 7,000 square feet. All of this was needed to support her life's main occupation: performing specialized, super-high-security simulations for the National Nuclear Security Administration."
"According to the TOP500, which ranks these mega-machines, Sierra was once the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. At the time of her death sentence, her processing power ranked a still-respectable 23rd in the world."
Sierra was a supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that served the National Nuclear Security Administration for seven years, performing high-security nuclear simulations. Built from thousands of IBM Power9 CPUs and Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs, Sierra occupied 7,000 square feet across 240 racks and once ranked as the world's second-fastest supercomputer. The government invested at least $325 million in Sierra and her twin supercomputer Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After seven years of operation, Sierra was decommissioned in October, with her processing power having declined to 23rd place globally by the time of her shutdown.
#supercomputer-decommissioning #nuclear-simulations #lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory #computing-infrastructure #government-technology
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