Uncle Sam's next big super might not use GPUs
Of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, nine of the top 10 are powered by GPUs, but that might not be the case for much longer.
As chipmakers like Nvidia prioritize AI FLOPS over the ultra-precise floating point calculations used in scientific computing, US National Labs are turning to new chip architectures to get their FP64 fix.
Among the candidates is NextSilicon’s Maverick-2, a dataflow processor designed explicitly with the 64-bit floating point mathematics that dominate the Department of Energy’s most important simulations.
Despite its name, the Department of Energy is concerned with far more than the US’ power grid. It operates some of the largest publicly known supercomputers in the world, which are responsible for everything from simulating the physics of nuclear weapons at the moment of criticality and bioweapons defense to public health and safety.
Since the Titan Supercomputer made its debut in 2012, a growing number of these...
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