Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer

A ribbon-cutting ceremony held virtually at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) today marked the official launch of Perlmutter – aka NERSC-9 – the GPU-accelerated supercomputer built by HPE in partnership with Nvidia and AMD. The HPE Cray EX supercomputer harnesses 6,159 Nvidia A100 GPUs and ~1,500 AMD Milan CPUs to deliver nearly 3.8 exaflops of theoretical “AI performance” (see endnote) or about 60 petaflops of peak double-precision (standard FP64) HPC performance.

The system is the namesake of Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to research showing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. So it’s fitting that one of the initial use cases for the Perlmutter supercomputer will be in support of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is probing the effect of dark energy on the universe’s expansion.

The Perlmutter system will help map the visible universe spanning 11 billion light years by processing data from DESI, which is capable of capturing as many as 5,000 galaxies in a single exposure.

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