Boosted by Artificial Intelligence, the powerful Perlmutter supercomputer will help design the largest 3D map of the visible universe ever. It will study dark energy and the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe.
here is the Perlmutter, one of the most powerful AI-powered supercomputers on the planet. Just unveiled by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and designed in partnership with AMD, Nvidia and Hewlett-Packard, its mission is to develop the largest ever 3D mapping of theuniverse visible. An objective that will allow us to study thedark energy otherwise known as dark energy. It is this form of energy that explains theacceleration of the expansion of the Universe.
For this, the supercomputer will process the data on this energy recorded by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi). Established at telescope Mayall near Tucson, Arizona (United States). Desi aims to measure the light issued by tens of millions of galaxies going back to 12 billionlight years.
Energy and Dark and Dark Matter: Discovering the Dark Side of the Universe
One year of data processed in a few days
Perlmutter machinery encloses 1.535 knots featuring both an AMD Epyc 7763 processor, featuring 64 cores and four Nvidia A100 GPUs. In total, it is a cumulative power of four exaflops that the supercomputer. It has a storage capacity of 35 petabytes.
With this arsenal, Perlmutter would be able to process in a few days a full year of data collected by Desi, whereas it would take several weeks, even months, with current systems.
At the moment, the Perlmutter is only in its first phase of development. A little later this year, it will evolve with an upgrade which will add 3,072 nodes to it, each equipped with two AMD Epyc 7763 chips. In addition to the development of 3D mapping of the Universe and research on dark energy, Perlmutter will also be used for “clean” energy research.
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