There is a lot of activity and investment in the U.S supercomputer space now. After years of falling behind China for supercomputer superiority, the U.S is now storming back.
On Oct. 26, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) formally dedicated the Sierra system, which is now the world’s third fastest supercomputer. The Sierra system is built with the same basic design as the IBM Summit system, which became the world’s most powerful supercomputer in June. Summit is a 200 petaflop system, while the newly dedicated Sierra currently tops out at 125 petaflops.
Sierra is a massive system spread out across 7,000 square feet of data center space. The system has 240 computing racks and 4,320 nodes.