LANL installs first NVIDIA Vera CPU systems in its Darwin testbed

LOS ALAMOS - Los Alamos National Laboratory has installed its first NVIDIA Vera CPU systems in its Darwin testbed, where staff are preparing software and applications for three planned supercomputers, according to a laboratory news release.

Each air-cooled MGX Vera node pairs two Vera CPUs, each with 88 Olympus cores, in a two-socket server linked by NVIDIA's NVLink Chip-to-Chip interface, the release says. The server arrived in August. The Darwin team installed it, deployed its software and ran performance and stability tests, and it is now used for benchmarking and application readiness work.

The lab's future Mission, Vision and Veritas supercomputers will all run on Vera CPUs and NVIDIA Rubin GPUs. Mission's full Vera CPU partition, called Ranger, is scheduled for installation in 2027, according to the release. The project builds on the co-design of the Grace CPU that powers the lab's Venado supercomputer.

Gary Grider, senior director for computing technology at Los Alamos, said the laboratory will be "one of the first institutions to receive the Vera CPU technology."