Los Alamos Archives - The Next Platform

The Skills Gap For Fortran Looms Large In HPC

May 2, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan 45

Back in the dawn of time, which is four decades ago in computer science and which was before technical computing went mainstream with the advent of Unix workstations and their beefy server cousins, the computer science students we knew at college had taught themselves BASIC on either TRS-80s or Commodore VICs and they went to college to learn something useful like COBOL and maybe got a smattering of C and Pascal, or occasionally even RPG, for variety. …

Nuclear Weapons Drove Supercomputing, And May Now Drive It Into The Clouds

April 19, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan 8

If the HPC community didn’t write the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996, it would have been necessary to invent it. …

HPC

Los Alamos Taps Seagate To Put Compute On Spinning Rust

March 16, 2023 Tobias Mann 1

High performance computing workloads simulating all manner of things can produce a veritable mountain of data that has to be sifted through. …

HPC

Opening Up The Future “Venado” Grace-Hopper Supercomputer At Los Alamos

May 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan 4

There are many interpretations of the word venado, which means deer or stag in Spanish, and this week it gets another one: A supercomputer based on future Nvidia CPU and GPU compute engines, and quite possibly if Los Alamos National Laboratory can convince Hewlett Packard Enterprise to support InfiniBand interconnects in its capability class “Shasta” Cray EX machines, Nvidia’s interconnect as well. …

Sneak Peek At “Sapphire Rapids” Xeons In “Crossroads” Supercomputer

February 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan 3

Managing an aging nuclear weapons stockpile requires a tremendous – and ever-increasing – amount of supercomputing performance, and the HPC system business the world over is focused on this as much as trying to crack the most difficult scientific, medical, and engineering problems. …

Nvidia Enters The Arms Race With Homegrown “Grace” CPUs

April 12, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan 8

There has been talk and cajoling and rumor for years that GPU juggernaut Nvidia would jump into the Arm server CPU chip arena once again and actually deliver a product that has unique differentiation and a compelling value proposition, particularly for hybrid CPU-GPU compute complexes. …

HPC

With “Crossroads” Supercomputer, HPE Notches Another DOE Win

October 1, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan 2

When you come to the crossroads and make a big decision about selling your soul to the devil to get what you want, it is supposed to be a dramatic event, the stuff that legends are made of. …

Mythbusting Containers, The Los Alamos Way

December 11, 2019 Dan Olds 0

As is the case with any new technology, there is a lot of hype and misunderstanding that comes along with something that actually improves some aspect of the system. …

ARM is the NNSA’s New Secret Weapon

November 7, 2018 Nicole Hemsoth Prickett 0

It might have been difficult to see this happening a mere few years ago, but the National Nuclear Security Administration and one of its key supercomputing sites are looking past Intel to Arm-based supercomputers in hopes of reaching efficiency and memory bandwidth targets needed for nuclear stockpile simulations. …

A Quantum Approach to Next Generation Nuclear Security

November 11, 2015 Nicole Hemsoth Prickett 1

With the end of physical nuclear testing came an explosion in computing technology at massive scale to simulate in rich detail and high resolution the many scenarios and factors that influence a hefty nuclear weapons stockpile. …