Sierra (supercomputer)
Sierra is an IBM - supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of the United States . It went into operation in June 2018 and is the "military twin" of the Summit supercomputer, which consists of POWER9 processors and Nvidia Tesla Volta computing accelerators on the same hybrid architecture . While Summit is used for civil research, Sierra will support nuclear weapons research.
The total of 4,320 computer nodes of the type IBM-Power -S922LC differ only in details from the ones used by Summit:
- higher clocked processors: 2 POWER9 CPUs with 22 cores and 3.1 GHz
- 4 instead of 6 Nvidia Volta computing accelerators per node as with Summit
- 256 GB DDR4 memory
- 1.6 TB non-volatile RAM or SSD storage
In the TOP500 super computer list from June 2018, it was measured as the third fastest computer in the world. After the final expansion, it then reached second place in the TOP500 list from November 2018. In the corresponding Green500 list, it received 6th place with a computing efficiency of 12.681 GFLOPS / watt.