Nvidia to Build a 3D Map of the Universe

Perlmutter is "the fastest system on the planet on 16- and 32-bit mixed-precision math AI uses" as Nvidia states. It can deliver almost four exaFLOPS of AI performance (and mind you, an exaFLOP is one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second). The supercomputer is powered by 6,159 Nvidia A100 Tensor Core graphics processing units, and the company is planning to introduce another tranche of CPU cores to further boost its performance.

“Traditional supercomputers can barely handle the math required to generate simulations of a few atoms over a few nanoseconds with programs such as Quantum Espresso,” explains Dion Harris, Nvidia's Senior Product Marketing Manager.

The powerful AI machine is named after astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter. As Dr. Perlmutter said, “This is a very exciting time to be combining the power of supercomputer facilities with science, and that is partly because science has developed the ability to collect very large amounts of data and bring them all to bear at one time. This new supercomputer is exactly what we need to handle these datasets. As a result, we are expecting to find new discoveries in cosmology, microbiology, genetics, climate change, material sciences, and pretty much any other field you can think of.”

The first task the supercomputer is going to perform is going to be the creation of a 3D map of the universe. This will eventually help researchers learn more about dark energy, the force behind the ever-accelerating expansion of the universe. The discovery of dark energy is what won Dr. Saul Perlmutter the Nobel Prize.

“The supercomputer will help assemble the largest 3D map of the visible universe to date. It will process data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a kind of cosmic camera that can capture as many as 5,000 galaxies in a single exposure,” comments Dion Harris.

You can read more about Perlmutter on the official website of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Also, don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.